Bake particles

[kdiddy13]

I'm not sure what this would do to memory and scene size, but I'll request it anyway and let the "eggheads" sort it out.


I would love it if it were possible to "bake" a particle system out. In other words, if I had a bunch of animated snowflakes in a particle system and I hit bake, it would create individual objects that could then be individually keyed and moved about (removing them as "particles").

Would they all get separate layers? or objects on one layer? Perhaps a choice of what the bake function does, like keep bones or just put out the animated lines, separate into layers or one layer with all elements.

Why do this? More control over an animation. You could create interaction between particles and objects. Remove "offensive" characters from a crowd or "mow the grass". Speed up render time if there doesn't need to be a particle simulation.

Add this to my wishlist for particles which also includes irregularly shaped fields (like gravity, force, etc), and the ability to key all particle attributes (perhaps even through lua scripting).

Basically, I'm fascinated by the particle system and would love to see more controls available for it. It has a great deal of unrealized potential.
________
Toyota motor manufacturing west virginia history

[AcouSvnt]

Remove "offensive" characters from a crowd

Heh, it sounds like you have an agenda.

[Lost Marble]

Yes, I see what you're getting at. In a real production, directors always get picky and say things like, "Get rid of that one spark in the upper-right corner."

One possible solution would be to write a partiucle simulator in Lua. A script could be written that would duplicate the selected layer (or a group of layers) X number of times, and move them around according to some physical simulation, adding keyframes to animate them. Then, after running it, it would be a simple matter of deleting or adjusting whatever "particle" layers that don't line up just how you want them to.

Of course, baking an existing particle layer would allow more flexibility up until the point you bake it, but that'll have to wait for a future version of Moho.