shape instance animation

[super gnu]

ok.. last pflow related begging post.


anyone know if there are any methods to get better control over the animation playback on animated shape instance particles?

at the moment the best i can do is start them when the particle is born, and randomise an offset.

i want to be able to randomise the playback rate too, and ideally id love to be able to control playback rate with operators during the lifetime of the particle, so i could, for instance speed up the playback rate as the particle moves faster etc...

im guessing doable with box3..? are there any operator packs available for pflow apart from oleg's stuff?


on a related note, is thinking particles in any way as accessible as pflow? it looks very powerful, but possibly only for people with very mathematical brains, who need to do particles every day of the week.

i really just want pflow, but without the missing 8 years of development. its a nice system to work with, when it works...

[joconnell]

No you can't do it with the base pflow but box 3 with let you drive parameters of modifiers, including the playback rate in a point cache for example. Thinking particles is huge, so it'd take you far longer to set up the simple system you had for the birds taking off then randomly gliding / flapping. Once you had this though you'd have way more control and possibilities. Thinking particles is slow and complex at the start, but since with particles you end up redoing the same things a lot, thinking particles has a great preset system so you save off little chains of operators and gradually build up a library to speed you up. The caching actually works too

[super gnu]

ok then well it looks like ill have to go to 2014 and check out the box 3 stuff.


on a related note, how do i bake a pointcache of a group of objects, including their transforms? must be a way to collapse everything to a single mesh with only vertex animation... i remember a script....?

[joconnell]

It's the world space point cache modifier for starters, not sure on whether that'd work with a selection of objects or not.