Been waiting for this, Trapcode Form plugin for AfterEffects
I knocked up the above image in a few minutes playing with it, very nice, but I have a feeling it will produce images that were obviously done using the plugin, you'll soon have a trapcode form look.
And some more of my quick tests:
Very fire like.. yet not fire
Just wondering if I can achieve similar things within Cinema 4D, which would then have much more power, but be slower to render
Done with Trapcode Form
The following are all from Cinema4D:
The same principles apply for the accumulation of HUE, shifting from red thru orange to yellow depending on the density
A bit coarse. Done with lots of transparent cubes. Deformed by a noise shader.
Same as above but further deformed by a spherical deformer.
Problem is, that seems to be the hard coded maximum number of objects you can clone.... shit!
Max matrix size is 50,000...... lame! I need millions!
So uhm.. that essentially makes it useless
I tried using plane to place objects on and sure enough I can place more than 50,000 clones but it crashed
:-P
also that's then limited to only polygonal objects and cannot generate thinking particles (for no good reason)
So some kind of internal problem going on there, 50,000 polygons easy peasy, 50,000 1 polygon objects.... forget it
Had an epiphany! use visiible lights instead should be super fast...
You can make a light emit no light and cast no shadow, yet still be made visible. Which basically just draws a circular gradient around each light:
Loooks ace, sadly took 13 minutes to render :-S so much for being fast, I guess It's calculating it volumetrically
which seems very expensive way of basically putting a gradient round a light.
So the only way I can go above 50,000 involves using lights and they happen to be by far the slowest method,
which is not better if the render never actually finishes.
I've tried using Hair on splines, but you can't effect the color via mograph effectors.. why not maxon!?
I've tried cellrendering/sketch and toon
Less lights = 33 seconds
2 Minutes 24
18 Minutes
2 Minutes! that's faster!
2 Minutes
1 Minute using
cluster.. not bad
:-D
Sadly this method doesn't seem to work with deformers because it uses thinking particles
and there no way to change the color with a mograph effector... why not Maxon!!
download my example file from:
Link: helios.mine.nu --- PryoFrax.zip
This uses pyrocluster so It's nice and fast and smooth.
25 Minute Render, no idea WHY it took that long and after all that it was incorrect, It's not meant to be stripey
So frustrating, this could be such a powerful technique if it wasn't so slow.
You could use this for all sorts, generating volumetric trails from moving objects for example.
The future is volumetric baby! voxels rule! polygons suck! sub-poly-displacement can only take you so far.
36 Minutes 90,000 particles rendered with pyrocluster
I wrote my own Xpresso in order to get past the 50,000 limit of mographs matrix object.
Trying to render this many items using visible lights well... It's painfull, it just runs out of RAM almost immediately. And I\'m not short on RAM either.
8 Minutes 44,000 Particles, fairly uninteresting result. *thinks*
Finished the Flowery dealy
Needs to be viewed at high brightness
I've unknowingly cropped about an inch all the way round by mistake, oops, ah well it looks good for it, just wondering how I could have done it without knowing
:-P
Spent all yesterday crashing, reaching some kind of limit in VRay, maybe even the 4gb RAM limit of 32bit address space, but who knows.
I've composed the background render with the previous render of the flowers, so the lighting won't match up and it won't have and shadows, but just to see what it would look like
I'm not liking it at the moment, I\'m hoping that's just because the foreground lighting does'nt gell with the background, but I think I\'m going to have to rethink this.
I think it requires many more vines for it to work, not just 1 spindley one, and I don't think my computer can handle it in a reasonable time frame
Ugh can't get leaves/flowers to look any good
They look all plasticy
This is a bit better
13 Minutes
I may have forgotten to turn on the SKY before rendering this, but all is good it only took 30 minutes
:-)
Now ill be able to compare both the aesthetic improvement and the detriment caused to render time by the HDR lighting
I think I\'m going to remove the whole bottom vine, where It's framing the bottom of the image. It's obstructing too much and it looks like shit cus of the low poly count, I could make it higher poly
Took 35 Minutes, so the HDR sky did'nt add much to the render time at all. I've got some odd black leaves now, and the red vines don't go too well, just makes a big red fuzzy mess.
Getting a bit more abstract now with my flowery visions *shrugs*
It needs some kind of backdrop my first thoughts are putting it inside some tunnel like hole that surrounds the swirly path of the vine
I draw by hand a path around the shape of the vine and Lathe it to form the following dirty hole:
Subpoly displacement is awesome! (and slow)
Add some specular and moss grass type thing, as mud surrounding flowers isn't particularly cute
I've created some breaks in the outerwall to let light in and make it more interesting
A lighting test with displacement turned off, trying to position a sun type light to cast a shadow + strong burnt out glow on the grassy side, the logic being moss/grass would grow in the sun lit areas and not in the dark shaded part.
Tweaked the lighting by changing the environment map to a sunset type HDR and changing It's hue. Also changed the sun light to an area light so it casts a softer shadow. The HDR is flooding light in at a horizontal angle now which is lighting up the hole on the right, which is something I wanted. The GI Quality is here is lowest hence the weird blue dots on the left.
1 hour 20 in on lowest GI!!
This is with the Displacement on and It's killing the render times when in combination with GI, I don't even want to think how slow it will be with the vine/leaves turned on. And to think, I was planning on adding hairs to the moss to make it grassy... forget that! my computer will esplode!
I think I have rather incorrect GI settings, for use with sub-poly displacement.. I have some ideas! (reads manual)
3 hours 25 in..... definitely need some optimizations
render with GI = 10 minutes, render with Displacement = 10 minutes, render with Displacement and GI = infinity
Would help if the manual for this was both complete and not in engrish:
"This will result inpoorer results of course but nrings speed advantages. Specially for
previews you can turm of the seondary engine, or if you have scenes that not at all
use any glossy effects."
ah well that's beta software for you.
