any plans for partio support?

[ALFRED_ST_MEDIA]

Perhaps this is better posted in the Phoenix forum, but since it's ultimately a rendering question, here we are. I searched the forum for 'partio' and came up empty handed. This hasn't come up yet?

http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/partio.html

https://github.com/wdas/partio

http://groups.google.com/group/partio-discuss/topics

Since I don't see particle support for alembic coming any time soon, this is the best way I can see to get data to and from RF, Houdini, Maya, Softimage, etc. I also see that Fury supports partio, as well as some other lovely Krakatoa-like features.

So, any thoughts on partio support?

Thank you,

-ctj

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Looks like a very nice library to read and write various particle formats. We will definitely look into it. If you don't mind going through Maya, it seems this library can be useful http://redpawfx.github.com/partio/

[ALFRED_ST_MEDIA]

To be sure, he's done a very nice job of implementing partio for maya, and I'm downloading his plugin now (so to do...so little time), but the issue in my experience is maya chokes on particle counts greater than 1M. If, much like vrscene and alembic, we could deffer the load of all the particles until render time, life would be very good indeed.

[mr furious]

+1 on this... or alembic particles!

[vlado]

Alembic particles are planned anyways; as well as hair...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Metzger]

I do have to say that the Partio IO plugin for Maya is awesome. John Cassella did a great job integrating the visualizer. He even includes now a really nice converting program to take large XYZ pointcloud files and convert them to prt files which load really fast and are much smaller in size. It would be great if you could render the XYZ RGB data in V-Ray, or even assign a V-Ray shader to pointcloud data.

[flay]

Any word on this? Just searched out this thread after trying to get partio working in Maya with Phoenix and V-Ray. We're using production versions at the moment, would this or alembic particle support be available in anything later? More RnD than production needs, having some issues with particle counts bogging down Maya. partIO is great!

[kweechy]

Is anyone here using Partio to handle geometry instancing here? Bit tangential to the discussion, but it's pretty rare to find people talking about Partio so I was curious.

[EJohn]

Is anyone here using Partio to handle geometry instancing here? Bit tangential to the discussion, but it's pretty rare to find people talking about Partio so I was curious.

Not so much the partio instancer as we've not found a way to pass rgbPP from it to vRay (not possible atm? Would be amazing to get this supported!)
We have been using the partioimport function alot though- hooking points and attributes from Houdini up to standard maya particleshapes and then instancing from that.
It's a great workflow for stuff that doesn't need to move as we can visualize/manipulate all the object cycling/colouring/transformations much more easily in Houdini than by messing with expressions in Maya and it's trivial to reload the points.

[vlado]

Not so much the partio instancer as we've not found a way to pass rgbPP from it to vRay (not possible atm? Would be amazing to get this supported!)

V-Ray supports the rgbPP channel for Instancer objects, but you need to explicitly specify that the channel needs to be translated. It works with native Maya particles + Instancer, but we haven't really tried it with the Partio IO plugin...

Best regards,
Vlado

[EJohn]

Yeah it works fine with the Maya particles and instancer, just not the partIO instancer