General FAQParticle Storm is an easy to use, feature driven particle system tool for LightWave. |
| What is a particle system? |
| A particle is something that has position and velocity, but occupies no space and has no volume. In other words, a particle will allow you to define the position and velocities of objects, but does not care about the volume of the objects, whatever they are. A system of particles is just a large group of particles interacting with each other and the environment they occupy. These interactions include external forces such as wind and gravity as well as inter-particle attraction and repulsion. The natural world exhibits such complex and beautiful motion, and since Particle Storm was designed around the same laws of physics that govern our real world, we can have this capability in LightWave as well. |
| How can you use particles to improve your LightWave animations? |
| Particle systems are tremendously useful when it comes to animating large groups of objects exhibiting complex behavior. The basic use of Particle Storm is just that… making particle animations like flying sparks. Making a flying logo with trails of particles emitting from its vertices is an example of this sort of application. As your experience with Particle Storm grows, you will see that in fact, you can use Particle Storm to help animate actual objects in your scene. How would you animate a flock of birds or angry bees that are swirling around? How about a large herd of buffalo running? It would be quite a task to animate these items individually. However, using Particle Storm, you can achieve these effects literally in minutes with completely realistic motion. |
| How does Particle Storm communicate with LightWave? |
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Particle Storm is a plug-in, a third party application that "attaches" itself to LightWave to improve and add to its capabilities. LightWave uses plug-ins differently depending on what kind of service the plug-in provides. This is why Particle Storm is actually divided into three plug-ins. First is the Generic plug-in called "PSCreate". Here is where you set up your particle animation, and is very similar to setting up a scene in LightWave. You position where you want your particles emitteed from, how you want them to move around, how they are to be shaded, etc. The difference is that at this stage, Layout is not aware of your particles. To do that, you have to save your settings and particle objects to a file so that LightWave can load them and use them. This file is a special format called a ".psm". In addition to the .psm file is the particle object. The particle object is the geometry that is rendered. We'll discuss more about these files in depth later, as they are very important! Once you save a .psm file, we proceed to the Displacement Map. Here you load the .psm, which is used to displace, or move, the particle objects in your scene. At this stage, the particles can actually be viewed in Layout. The Displacement Map plug-in can be found under the Objects Panel/Displacement Maps. The Particle Storm Item Motion plug-in is used to replace particles with any layout item . Instead of loading a particle object, you just select ANY item such as a light, bone or object. The Item Motion plug-in literally replaces a particle with an object. The Item Motion plug-in can be found under Generic plug-ins.
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| Are particles always points? |
| Absolutely not! Even though you can choose particles to be represented as single point polygons (rendered as dots), you can use any object as a particle; you can even use bones as particles. There are also special kind of particle objects like hair and sub-objects. |
| What third party applications support Particle Storm data? |
| Steamer, HyperVoxels, and Genesis VFX are three plug-ins that utilize Particle Storm data to render particles as smoke, blobs and other interesting effects. The ability to simulate dynamic particles that interact with your virtual environment realistically combined with the photo-realistic renders that these applications provide can add an intense level of realism for any project. |
| What can you do if you run into problems? |
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You will notice that at the end of each section in this help file a
"Warning" or "Quick Tips" notice is posted. These are problems that you might run into, and gives you valuable tips to avoid them. There is also a sectioned titled "Trouble Shooting" which deals with some of the known problems with particle storm.
Knowing where to find help when you need it is important in your learning process. There are many places that discuss using Particle Storm related topics. Check the LightWave newsgroup at comp.graphics.apps.lightwave. Check our website at www.dynamic-realities.com.
Product Patches can be downloaded from our website at: www.dynamic-realities.com/download.htm |