Metaballs for VRay

[Jiri.Matys]

Absolutely amazing!!!

Will You release this plugin ?

[Da_elf]

and iso metaball system hehehe

[MasterBercon]

I've managed to get the refractoring half done. Reading data is the next thing after that which I need to improve and then there is still the UI.

Doing the meshing part isn't on my todo list atm since its a whole new matter and I'm not sure I wanna step into that mess.

Competing is a lot more fun than doing stuff together!

[RErender]

Competing is a lot more fun than doing stuff together!

Nice progress so far!

[MasterBercon]

By the way dimo, I was also thinking of doing the iso volume primitive after I'm done with the metaballs. Did you build the tri mesh raytracing from ground up to implement first intersecting the object and see if you are in or outside and then measuring the distance to it? Or did you use some of VRays internal way of handling tri meshes? You also built some caching system to 3D textures, did you just evaluate multiple points inside each cell to see if there is anything there other than black?

Another thing I was thinking of writing was distance to particle map, you could use it with VRays environment fog to render particles as smoke or something. Since I already built the BVH for searching particles in space just converting it to map is easy.

[MasterBercon]

Here we go: http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jylila...taballs_24.jpg

Its getting closer, I took controls from the mostly from the blobmesh. The Pick and Add buttons on the nodes rollout still aint working for some odd reason.

I also worked out the inputs. Now it should work with animated mesh, pflow, simple particles and maxscript. You can input Point3 values to array and it'll render those, also works with animated values.

[jacksc02]

do any forces affect the blobs? like gravity?

[MasterBercon]

How should the gravity affect them? Bend the time-space like in real world around a black hole?

That wouldn't be too hard I think, but I'm not sure if it'd have any practical uses.

[duke2]

do any forces affect the blobs? like gravity?

Sounds like something more to do with the particles themselves than the rendering of the particles!

[jacksc02]

im thinking of the gravity affecting the blobs by squashing them. As things with mass in the real world are affected by gravity

[instinct]

Drops are rather spherical tho...as while falling (wich they usually do when in mid air) are near zero g.

See also:
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasc...1/gen01429.htm

Tho it might be a nice way to fake things. For example having them scale in speed space can be used to fill holes in high velocity simulations.

Regards,
Thorsten

[dellis]

Keep up the great work!

[MasterBercon]

Now I've managed to get everything working and as a final touch updated it to SP3a.

Here is an example (motion blurred + SSS): http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jylila...taballs_25.jpg

And here is the first beta version for 2009 64, VRay SP3a: http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jylila..._64_BETA_1.dlo

Note! You must put it to your 3dsmax/plugins/vrayplugins/ folder.
Note #2! This version has no support and there is a chance that new versions are not compatible with this one.

There is no known bugs at the moment.

[Paul Oblomov]

Kewl. max 2010 version planned ?

[percydaman]

You are indeed the master...