Particles-Blobbies Tutorial

Ive never enjoyed carpal tunnel so much, thanks, once more....

HomeSlice, This is a very good tutorial on blobbies - thanks. I have found several others (Jeff Paris lava flow) and in version 16rc2 I have come across several small problems that I don't know if it is related to the new version. First, all my blobbies are round circles with no fill. Second, I cannot find the setting to not show normals on back side polygons. Three, at several points in the rendering (frame 17, 20, 47) A:M just hung; I had to force quit after 40 minutes.

Thanks!


They will look like that if you are in wireframe view. If you switch to Shaded view, does their appearance change?


Go to Tools > Options > Rendering.
Switch the "Quality" setting to "Shaded".
A new property named "Show Backfacing Polys" will appear. Set it to OFF.


Not sure why A:M hung, but this is another reason to render out to an image sequence for final renders. Then if you have to force quit, you can just restart the render beginning with the next frame. When I do quick preview renders just to test timing, motion etc, I always render in Shaded mode to a Quicktime or AVI movie. But when i do my final renders, I always render to tga, png or exr image sequence.

HomeSlice, about the transparency - I was rendering in Shaded (9). Changing the setting in the Rendering tab of Options did make the backside polys option appear. But, I am still getting circles with no fill. Only the outline is of the color in the properties panel.

Click to view attachment

I think you need to Final render to see blobbies. The circles are just a quick approximation to help get you going.
Blobbies are not speedy to render.

btw, "Fluid" particles usually render much faster than Blobbies and can be used in most blobby situations

Thanks guys, I will look at both suggestions.

Wow! you are right about a slow render. This is where I wish that the code Steffen wrote for the new Netrender could be included in A:M proper, so that multi-core machines (like mine) could take advantage of the extra computing power.

You can run Blobby renders on Netrender too. They are all single core too, there's just more of them working simultaneously.

I took the "volcano" proj. and changed from blobby to fluid. BTW, I can't find anything in the A:M tech manual about fluids. I get quite a bit of spinning beachball with fluids. Here is a screen shot of the result.

Click to view attachment

How can I fix this to look more like blobbies?

My first gambit would be to reduce the "initial velocity"

Here's the first tut on Fluids:

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...3&hl=fluids

Searches on "Fluids" after that date will also find useful discussions