XSI particles- frustrating

[leolo]

it is me or it is really furstrating to get a good simulation with xsi particles?
is good to try a quick thing, to show an example of something , fire, water, rain, grass, dust... but when it comes to the moment of doing things for real it is just impossible, unstable to start, weird things happens when using too many events and emmiters, render is frustating, assign a shaders, duplicating a ptype, etc.. it is just too confusing.

well, maybe is me, but wante d to hear from others.

I saw my friend playing around with the particles system on max as it was so fast and intuitive , the kind of things one would expect, a human interface :)

[thiago]

it is me or it is really furstrating to get a good simulation with xsi particles?
is good to try a quick thing, to show an example of something , fire, water, rain, grass, dust... but when it comes to the moment of doing things for real it is just impossible, unstable to start, weird things happens when using too many events and emmiters, render is frustating, assign a shaders, duplicating a ptype, etc.. it is just too confusing.

well, maybe is me, but wante d to hear from others.

I saw my friend playing around with the particles system on max as it was so fast and intuitive , the kind of things one would expect, a human interface :)

Pflow in 3dsmax is fun but is slow as hell with a reasonable tree... particle playback in 3dsmax was horrible before pflow... then it got a little better but right now I don't know how it's. I'm far from 3dsmax for so long.

But well ... you know. People have been talking about this new particle system for XSI.. so let's see if this thing show up eventually and mabe will be cool :)

For now you can play with Helge's particle system which is quite cool features.
And you can still use it with normal XSI particles. http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=29;action=display;threadid=33221

[KPaetow]

I agree with your sentiments, leolo. I'm just dying to do fluids of all kinds in XSI. Realistic ones. Not necessarily just liquids, either. Smoke, clouds, flames, viscous liquids, running water, lava, ocean surf, you name it.

I've been hearing lots about Moondust, but I don't want to get my hopes up based on things that are, for the most part, speculative at this point. (I've not seen any demos, but I know that some have.)

I don't have the bucks to pony up for Realflow. Shame. Looks like one could create all kinds of virtual mayhem with that!

[Heinerich]

Looks like one could create all kinds of virtual mayhem with that!We've been using Realflow now for some years and it's far from being a one click solution. In fact, it requires lots of testing, many dedicated rendernodes to get usable solutions in time (usual workflow is: try 5 different settings and let them solve overnight on 5 different machines).

I try to fake fluidish stuff whenever possible, because the real deal just takes a whole lot of work.

Regarding XSI's particle system: Surely there are only few good looking examples that come with it.. but depending on what you need you can push it quite far.

Smoke: For creating good smoke without any 3rd party tools it's important not only to use forcefields, but also the brownian particle noise itself. It really helps to get nice wispy flocks of particles. If you can spend a few bucks there's emfluid ( http://shop.skylife.de/index.php?cPath=35&language=en ), which is a solver that does look like those nice navier stokes implementations of other packages. Combined with the BA volume shader or Genietail for the particle shading you can do really good smoke.

Fire: I found it hard to create really convincing 3D-fire without any help. A good way to fake things is to combine your 3D efforts with particles emitted from an image sequence of filmed real fire plus a lot of creative compositing. Depending on the type of fire you need you can get very good results.

Some nice examples of fire and smoke done with XSI (and BA volume) can be seen in Gorillaz' El Manana musicvideo ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEB7i8bSwNA
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEB7i8bSwNA)

I recall having seen an in depth explanation of how he did what on xsibase, but I can't seem to find the URL right now.

Water indeed is an issue, that forces us to use RF :wink:

[KPaetow]

Thanks Heinerich! I'll look into your suggestions right away! I played with emfluid a while ago and was pleased with the flows it created. Didn't know about the volume shaders though so I'll go get both and see what they can to together.

KP