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Tuesday 17 June 2014

Passing rgbPP to Instanced Objects

This is a nice one that I have needed quite a lot in the past. Now, thanks to Arnold, it's extremely easy to do.

Here is the problem:

I want to vary the shading on objects that are instanced to a particle system.

In Maya and Mental ray this is not easy to do. In fact I don't know of any way to do it. In Arnold, however, it is very straightforward:

1. Create your particle and instancer system as you normally would do.

2. Assign a shader to your instanced objects (not the instancer object)

3. create an aiUserDataColor node

4. type rgbPP in the Color Attr Name in the aiUserColor node

5. connect aiUserDataColor.outColor --> diffuse in your shader (or whatever channel you need it to go to)

6. type rgbPP into the Export Attributes in the Arnold section of the particle object.


 That's it. A really easy and long overdue feature.









Friday 13 June 2014

Passing ageNormalized to Arnold

Passing the ageNormalized attribute from Maya particles to an Arnold shader is extremely useful and extremely not documented in Solid Angle's user guides. I will show two ways to do it - one is my own recipe, and one of from Pedro Gomez from the MtoA list.

Here is the problem:


I would like to pass my particle's ageNormalized to a shader, rather than age.

As you may be able to see from the screenshot, passing age sort of works, but not quite. Some of the oldest particles have reached the end of the colour ramp and wrapped around to the beginning of the ramp again.

If I try just typing in ageNormalized into the Export Attributes, it does not work at all, Arnold just reads the first value of the ramp and applies that value to every particle.

Is there a smart workaround for this? Can I put age/lifespanPP somewhere in the shader? But where? And talking of export attributes, can I put more than one attribue in there (eg age, lifespanPP, velocityPP)? 







First is my method: 

1. Add a new Dynamic Per-Particle Attribute, userScalar1PP, say.

2. Adding the runtime expression:

nParticleShape1.userScalar1PP=nParticleShape1.age/nParticleShape1.lifespanPP;


3. Put userScalar1PP into the Export Attributes

4. Connect the particle sampler to the shader ramps, but use the UserScalar1PP attribute instead of age.






Second is Pedro's way - more correct and elegant:

Export both the age and lifespanPP and catch those in two aiUserDataFloat nodes. Then use a Multiply/Divide node and divide the age/lifespanPP. Then pipe that into your shader. This is a much better as it does not require an expensive runtime expression to be cached.



Here is the shader: one ramp for Colour and one for Opacity.




And the answer is yes, you can export any number of attributes, so long as they are seperated by a space in the Export Attribues box.







A sample scene is available in Maya 2014 MA format

UV particles via SOuP

Here is a small SOuP technique for producing a plane of particles with a UV gradient on their RGB.

First you need a plane, then emit some particles from that plane. Make sure that the particles have the rgbPP attribute available as we will need to put an expression on it.

Create a SOuP TextureToArray node
Create a SOuP rgbaToColorAndAlpha node
Create two ramp texture nodes - ramp1 is black to red along U, ramp two is black to green along V

Connect the following:

ramp2.outColor -->  ramp1.colorOffset
ramp1.outColor --> textureToArray1.inColor
polyPlaneShape.worldMesh[0] --> nParticleShape.inputGeometry
polyPlaneShape.worldMesh[0] --> textureToArray1.inGeometry
textureToArray1.outRgbaPP --> rgbToColorAndAlpha1.inRgbaPP 

Also connect the emitting plane's transform node to the particle's transform node as shown in the node graph.



Now set the rgbPP using the creation expression:

rgbPP=rgbaToColorAndAlpha1.outRgbPP

Rewind and step forward one frame so that the particles are emitted. Then set their initial state and disconnect the emitter and the connection between polyPlaneShape.worldMesh[0] --> nParticleShape.inputGeometry





The particles will now be dynamic again.


In Nuke, plug in your rendered particles into the STMap node as shown in the image below


GPU renderers

I will be testing some particle renderers in the next few days - Arnold, Fury and Krakatoa.


This first test is Fury

20 million nParticles
motion blur switched ON
4 x multisampling

13.26 seconds (dual Xeon E5 - 32 cores, 48GB RAM, Nvidia Quadro 4000)

I'm showing the alpha channel only because I currently just have the demo version of Fury and the watermark is distracting in the colour channel.


The next test is Krakatoa

motion blur OFF, render time 11 seconds

It's slightly trickier to get started with Krakatoa, but I think the results look amazing. Again, this is a lot of particles (14 million)


Here is my setup for Arnold, but I cannot seem to get the opacity to work properly.






More details as soon as I can get some help making this work.

I have finally got this working. Please see my later post "passing ageNormalized to Arnold"