vrayDistanceTex and pflow?

[kimgar]

i guess this is a longshot, but is there a way to wire the distanceTex into pflow?

seemed like an easy way to spawn particles in contact areas of objects

[vlado]

It should work - you should be able to add a ParticleFlow system to the VRayDistanceTex objects. In the example below, I distributed some particles over a teapot and used VRayDistanceTex to change the color of the material around the particles. A few notes:

= Currently the particle system must be visible in the viewport (but if you don't need it, you can turn off its Renderable flag);
= You can't use the same mesh as source for ParticleFlow and add it to the VRayDistanceTex texture at the same time - you'll have to use separate objects for this.



Best regards,
Vlado

[kimgar]

hmm, strange, loaded up my scene from yesterday, and it just worked, not sure what happened there.

excellent, it works pretty well now, got a few stray particles, but in this case that might not be such a bad thing.
good stuff, thanks for the info vlado.

[vlado]

Oh, you wanted it the other way round - using VRayDistanceTex in particle flow Good to know that it works.

Best regards,
Vlado

[kimgar]

it works with a distance of more than 4m, anything less than that does not produce any particles.
attached image has a distance of 0.2m which would be ideal.



anyone have any ideas on how to increase precision/sampling on this thing?

[vlado]

Not sure right away, but you can always pipe through an Output map and adjust the curve.

Best regards,
Vlado

[kimgar]

hmm, no, that seems to do the same thing. there's something else going on, object intersection has to be really exaggerated for particles to spawn at all, although the distanceTex renders fine either way.

also the docs says:

ImportantFor material-influenced emission to appear properly in the viewports, two conditions are required:
At least one viewport must be set to a shaded display mode.
The material or map must have Show Map In Viewport turned on in the Material Editor.

distanceTex has no show in viewport, but shows in viewport very occasionally, and when it does, it's not right. not sure if this has anything to do with it.

[kimgar]

now that is weird, if the spawn surface is not horizontal, things get really out of control :



i would have thought particles would spawn at the white spot which is the distanceTex...somethings going on...

[vlado]

now that is weird, if the spawn surface is not horizontal, things get really out of control:

It may be possible that ParticleFlow gives incorrect input to the VRayDistanceTex texture; it might work better if you keep the emitter with identity matrix (no translation/rotation/scale) and use Edit Mesh to move its vertices around as needed. Something similar happens with the 3ds Max Displace modifier and unfortunately there isn't much we can do about it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[kimgar]

aaaaha! thanks for your time vlado, this one is really appreciated. all i needed was a reset xform on the emitter and it works perfect! this opens up alot of cool things i've wanted to do for a long time.



good times!