spriteNumPP support with particles?

[Spinifex_Group]

I found this oldish thread...

http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...ht=spritenumpp

...which says there's no way to read spriteNumPP from a particle system into vray.

I assume that's still the case, but wanted to check.

(Some background info you probably know, but anyway) :

With maya you can have an image sequence, say 0-9, and when rendering particles as sprites drive the per-particle attribute spriteNumPP to make each particle select one of those 10 images. When I render a playblast or use the hardware render buffer I can see the correct images being used, but in vray all particles are only using the first image of the sequence.

[Spinifex_Group]

Found a workaround, in case anyone in future needs this. I had a 10 frame image sequence I was randomly distributing on my sprites.

1. add userScalar1PP
2. attributes->vray->per particle export
3. tick userScalar1PP
4. particle expression,add 'userScalar1PP, = spriteNumPP/10' (ie, take the sprite num and bring it down to 0-1)
5. make a file node for each frame in the sequence
6. connect them all to a ramp, set interpolation to none
7. make a particlesampler
8. connect userScalar1PP to the vCoord of the ramp
9. create a mult/divide node
10. mult the ramp by particleSampler.rgbPP
11. wire that to the self.illum of a vray material
12. do a similar dance for opacityPP, connect to opacity map

Oh maya... :/

[t.petrov]

I've added it in the ToDo and we'll see if we can make it work in the future.

Sorry for the inconvenience.