This pluggin is what I define as charityware and can be freely distributed. If
you find it useful make what you feel as an appropriate donation to your
favorite charity. You cannot charge or make any money from this routine by
reselling or bundling them with another package/cd/web page without my
permission.
To install this routine just copy the files into your 3ds Max plugin directory.
Particle Combustion is basically the same as the original Combustion but
instead of working with Combustion Apparati it works with particle systems. So
far tested systems include Snow, Rain, and the Sand Blaster Demo.
1.61
Fixes a bug where sample sizes come in at 10,0000.
1.55
Fixes a bug with the Outer Color not being used.
1.5
Now supports illumination of the particles so the particles volume is not self
illuminating and needs light to illuminate it. This means that the volume can
now recieve shadows from a light source and respects a light's attenuation and
color. Not all lights automatically are included in illuminating the volume.
You need to add them by using the pick button and selecting a light just like
you would pick a particle system. Only lights that are picked are calculated
for the illumination and the more lights the slower the render.
Note 1.5 is not complatible with 1.4, that is if you load up a file with a 1.4
particle combust you will get unpredictable results at best. You need to remove
the 1.4 particle combust from the enivroments list and then re addd the fields
by hand when you add 1.5. Once o get the versioning in maybe next vesion you
will not have to worry about it.
1.4
You can now base Color, Density, and Size based on a particles age. To do this
check the Track View Graph check boxes near the fields and then animate the
fields. For instance say that you wanted the effect color red when the
particles is birthed and black when the particles age is 30. All you would have
to do is turn on the Inner and outer based on track view graph check box and
then animated the color swatch from red to black from frame 0 to 30.
The 1.4 fixes the names not being saved in the Enviroment Dialog and adds
localizing of Density, Inner and Outer Color, and Size.
The 1.3 fixes the flashing when using localize explosion to particle life with
an animated phase.
The 1.2 fixes addes a random seed and localize noise to each particle.
The 1.1 fixes the object filter bug and problems with multi processor machines.
Particle Combustion works the same as the original Combustion. The only new
fields are:
Pick/Remove now allows you to add lights to the list.
Illuminate turns on and off, if it is on the particle volume will be
illuminated by the lights you added in the pick list. If it is off it reverts
to the normal self illuminating volume.
Particle Size: Determines the size of the combustion effect
Particle Life: Should be set to the life of the particles in the particle
system
Localize explosion to particle life: If this is checked and you are also using
the explosion option the color if using smoke, density, and size of the effect
is based on the life of the particle instead of the phase.
Localize noise to particle: If this is checked the noise is localized to each
particle. If it is not checked the particle travels through a noise else the
noise travels with each particle.
Particle Combustion is some R&D code that I wrote will exerimenting with
how to create hair. Did not work to well for hair mainly because the sample
rates had to extremely high and also volume effects are self illuminating,
don't cast shadows and don't recieve shadows. But it does make for some net
fiery type effects such as explosions.
Bugs
Since there is now internal shadow casting/recieving dense volumes can look
wrong If you delete a light that is illuminating the volume from the scene it
will crash when rendering. You need to remove the light first from the
enviroment menu and then delete the light from the scene.
Note this utility has not been fully tested in a production enviroment so use
at your own risk. If you encounter any problems please contact me at