Phoenix FD for Maya - Ramping point opacity and color?

[myth_vfx]

Hi,

I'm using Phoenix FD 3.11 for Maya(Build ID 20180530) and rendering points with the PhoenixFDFoam shader. My points have a fairly short lifespan (around 1 second) and I'm trying to ramp their color and opacity. I can get a color ramp with a PhoenixFDParticleTexture but don't know how to get the particles to fade out with an opacity ramp.

The color ramp seems to be buggy (it won't let me change the colors from their default red/blue values) and it sometimes causes the render to become very slow, even with only the default light. Is there a way to get a simple color/opacity ramp on points without using the PhoenixFDParticleTexture material?? I'm not doing any blending; just trying to do something very simple but it seems to be tricky....

Any ideas?? Thanks!
Eric

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Only the color of the Particle Shader can be mapped - right now the Particle Shader itself does not have the ability to shade particle with different alphas, but this is high priority and will be coming in the next versions.

You gotta tell us more about the gradient not letting you change colors though. Which Maya are you using? Also, can you send a scene that renders slow, so we can see how to improve it?

Thanks!

[myth_vfx]

Thanks Svetlin!

I'm using Maya 2018. Here's the gradient color problem in PhoenixFDParticleTexture: Once you set the color from the particle channel (I set it to age), I changethe color in the ramp.
However I get this error:

// Error: line 1: setAttr: No object matches name: .partcolor[0].partcolor_p //
// Error: status: (kFailure): Unexpected Internal Failure //

And the ramp color seems to change but when I change to a different tab in the attribute editor then change back; the color reverts.



I'm not sure about the slowdown when the points are colored; I'm unable to replicate it in a test scene; it may be my render settings.

Thanks! I'm looking forward to being able to map the opacity with the age!

Eric

[georgi.zhekov]

Thanks for reporting this. I have reproduced it and logged in the our bug tracking system. I will update the thread when we have a fix for it.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Alriiight, we got it! Seems to happen when you are looking at the particle texture in the Attribute Editor. If you have hypershade open and edit the texture there, there should be no error.

Will update you when this is fixed in the nightlies - hopefully tomorrow's.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Okay, should be fixed in tomorrow's nightlies.

Thanks for reporting this!

[myth_vfx]

Great, Thanks!