What can I do with the drag particles?

[ben_hamburg]

Hi there,

the title might be a bit misleading, I got two more precise questions:

1. Does the count multiplier kind of interpolate particles or just randomly place them around the existing ones? Or rather...in the few tests I did using it for foam I just got the impression the result became brighter overall, but not that there were particles filling up peviously empty spaces.
I am just asking, because I am still trying to figure out how to fill my underwater shot with millions of particles without using krakatoa...
2. This has probably already been asked before, possibly even by myself...but there is no way right now to render the particles created by Phoenix with custom shapes like with the VrayInstancer, right?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

The Count Multiplier creates new particles in between others, but they still need to be not too far apart, so maybe this causes new particles not to appear everywhere.

Note that the Particle Shader can render any particle system - no matter is it's Phoenix particles, or pflow, or PRT loaded via the PRT Reader, or particles generated by another plugin. Any Phoenix particle system can also be plugged in the instancer, but note that they don't have an orientation channel yet so you might not be able to rotate geometries with them.

Cheers

[ben_hamburg]

Ah, that sounds great...I?m guessing that pluging in the drag particles in the vrayinstancer will be total overkill for what I?m trying to do, I have some nice opacity mapped underwater particles, but a meter from the camera away they still just look like tiny dots, so I will probably end up splitting them in two parts: One for he far away particles rendered with the particle shader and one part for the ones close to the camera shaded with the opacity mapped particles from a standard Pflow system.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ahh, yes, this is because the Particle Shader in Point mode works in pixels so no matter how near or far the particles are, they are always gonna be the same size.

You could render them as Bubbles though - if you zero the highlight strength and size, don't connect a simulator as liquid geometry and use a very low IOR on the bubbles, this should look right and also render fairly quickly.