Phoenix FD Maya: Can't get particles to render (by attaching to Foam)

[KiloWattson]

Hey guys two separate problems.

First: I can't post new threads in the "Problems" thread and I can't seem to figure out why. I'm registered, I've purchased both PFD and VRay for Maya... and I've read all the FAQs. But for some reason I don't have the option to post. What am I missing?

Second (the real problem): I'm following this ChaosGroup tutorial here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpYJOIVSUx4

It's for Max, but I have Maya. For the most part I can follow along pretty well, but about halfway through he starts the process to get the particles to render as foam (and therefore act as finer dust for the destruction). This is the part I can't seem to get to work.

In Max, he easily adds the main PFD source to the Foam simulator and voila the particles are attached and rendering.

In Maya, this is less easily because it uses the confusingly obtuse relationship editor. My scene is relatively similar in that I have a bridge railing with 3 "broken" pieces that fly off when hit by a bus. Those pieces were easily encompassed within the main PFD simulator and are giving off smoke quite nicely. And I can see some awesome particles in the viewport, but for the life of me I can't find a way to attach these to the Foam simulator to render as points. NOTHING seems to work and I'm pretty certain it's because I can't figure out the correct secret button combination in the relationship editor to get the foam and particle source attached.

Is there anything that might point me in the right direction as to how to properly understand the relationship editor here?

[Ivaylo Katev]

it's possible that the particle size is too small, try to use the size multiplier of the particle shader , make it very big just to be sure that even the smallest particles will be brought to visible state.

[KiloWattson]

it's possible that the particle size is too small, try to use the size multiplier of the particle shader , make it very big just to be sure that even the smallest particles will be brought to visible state.

Tried that, didn't work unfortunately.

[KiloWattson]

FINALLY figured it out after literally all day working on this thing.

In the relationship editor, I connect the PHXFoamSet on the left to the PG_PhoenixFDSimulator1_Particles_of_[insertOneOfManyParticleEmittingObjectNamesHere] and voila! It wasn't quite like that in the Max tutorial so it took only eight thousand trial and error attempts.

[Ivaylo Katev]

well, i'm not familiar with maya, but it's a common assumption that the left/up pins are inputs and the right/down pins are outputs, not sure whether or not this is involved in your case.

[KiloWattson]

Not particularly from what I can tell (I'm not quite sure what editor you're referring to within Maya with "pins"... I'm guessing a node editor? I'm old school and grew up with their wonky standard relationship editor windows).

I've attached an image that shows what I was trying to do. On the right, at the bottom, you'll see those "PG..." nodes. Those are what I wasn't connecting. I kept just trying to connect the items that were emitting the particles and, being new to PFD, didn't even see those PG nodes down at the bottom underneath the materials.



Maya can be SO un-intiuitive sometimes!

[Ivaylo Katev]

yes, i meant node editor, i'm not familiar with maya and have no idea what they have.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Well, truthfully, it is possible to implement a custom Relationship editor that can filter out unusable nodes. But it's a lot of work (not just setting up the standard one) and we haven't look into this yet.