SimTenero Particle Physics [Commercial]
simtenero
Posts: 383
Hello All,
SimTenero Particle Physics has just been released and I am super excited to see what everyone does with it!
http://www.daz3d.com/simtenero-particle-physics-the-complete-bundle
I wanted to spin up a thread where I can answer your questions and collect your feedback. Here is a link to the documentation, I'd strongly recommend giving this a read as you get started:
I also wanted to add a couple of quick addendums:
Modifying Particle Textures - This is already covered in the doc, but there's one important note I forgot to add. I would recommend not using texture maps on particles or, at the least, using very small maps. Each particle has a unique material instance to accommodate animated effects. If you have 400 particles in your scene using texture maps, that'll be 400 copies of that texture in memory when you render (it doesn't use that much disk space when you save, only memory during a render). If you use very small textures (which makes sense the particles are usually pretty small :-)), maybe 256x256, it probably won't be too bad. Still, I'd recommend avoiding it and just dialing material properties when possible.
Saving Presets - If you have tweaked an emitter's settings and would like to save a preset, use File -> Save As -> Scene Subset, and select only the emitter. One very important note, your custom emitters need to be saved to the Content Library where the Particle Effects Engine/Emitter Packs are installed! I'd recommend creating your own folders in the existing Simtenero/Particle Physics/Emitters folder and saving your custom presets there.
There's a ton you can do with these emitters! I've probably only scratched the surface myself, so I can't wait to see what all of you talented artists come up with!!!
The emitter presets should make getting started pretty easy, but there are tons of variables to tweak if you want to dig in! Don't hesitate to post your questions here and I wioll do my very best to help you along the way. I also suspect the wider community may learn how to do things I haven't anticipated, so please feel free to share your tips and tricks!
Most Importantly, HAVE FUN!!! 
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Comments
Will these work in a still scene or are they only for animations?
It will work in still scenes as well as animations
. The animation script included with the Core Engine will handle the particle animations for you. Just set up your scene, load an emitter, and run the script. You'll need to set a number of frames for the simulation to run. How many frames you choose depends on the effect you're going for. I'd recommend starting with around 100 frames at 30FPS and tweak from there. You can get more accurate results from higher frame-rates at the expense of some extra processing time.
Great thank you!
Hey SimTenero
This certainly has peaked my interest :) There's a couple of things I've been wanting to try and I'm hoping you could answer a couple of questions for me? I'm wanting to simulate a contrail from an airplane, can I use an emitter and change the material to something like a cloud shape using cut-out and masking on a plane to get a cloud shape? I'm also hoping to do plumes of smoke and fire like this, so again using a cloud like material, but light it from the source so it looks like fire?
Hope that makes sense J
Many thanks
Neil
Hi Neil!
I think you could do a pretty convincing contrail. There are two settings you'd want to look at. First, you'd set a very small negative gravity value, so when the particles are emitted, they don't fall, they just drift very slowly upwards. Then you'd want to adjust the velocity dampen value so the particles would emit with an initial "poof" then stay put. You'd attach the emitter to the back of the plane, the idea being, as the plane moves, it emits "poofs" (
) which stay in place, rather than following the plane. You could probably use the basic sphere shape. You'd want to experiment with a couple other settings (emitSpread and emitVelocity in particular), and the material would be key in making it all look cloud-like.
Simple smoke plumes are also doable. Fire is a little trickier. The engine doesn't simulate turbulance, so you wouldn't be able to do whispy, flickering flames. But you could create a smoke plume with spheres, similar to the one in the demo video, then add an emitter of emissive tube shapes at its base that emit rapidly and die out very quickly. That's not going to be a perfect fire simulation, but I think it could still look pretty cool
How hard would it be to make custom shapes for primatives. The doc says it requires special construction. Or are you taking requests for further packs?
First request various leaf shapes.
It's sort of a fiddly process, but yes, I definitely want to kniw what shapes people would like to see in future packs! :-) Leaf shapes noted :-D
Just out of curiosity, are there going to be other types of Physics to come? I'm thinking less about emitters and more about things like spring constraints or soft body collisions? I have been dying to see a spring constraint IK for things like tails and such.
I'm working on a couple of things along those lines, but I don't want to make any bold declarations before I'm closer to having something finished
.
Hello Simtenero
how about export for external render? Are particles clones or real objet? What about the material: one by particle?
Thanks
Hey smaker1!
Each particle is a real object, so they can all be exported at once. Each particle has it's own material. That was necessary to allow each to animate its color and opacity independanty.
I came here to ask this very thing, since I wanted leaves, petals, and snowflakes (blobbier snow already looks possible with the existing set). This is a really fun-looking technology!
Fire motes/sparks. Electrical bolts/circles. Snowflakes. Viking Runes/Alchemical symbols (would look great being emitted with the Magic emitters). Lava blobs. Pebbles. Marbles. Ball bearings.
Some of these may technically just be one shape. ;)
I guess postwork would probably do this better but I was wondering about, maybe, muzzle flashes?
Thanks!
There's a great many effects that I've been hoping to animate in DAZ for some time now. I've already seen that rain is one of the options available with SimTenero Particle Physics, but how about other natural phenomenon, such as smoke, fire, lightning, and so on?
So interesting product, very well thought, very well done!
In the readMe I saw we had to stuck to the provided shapes. Is there a way for an "advanced user" to use specific other shapes (not provided by you, for personal use only)?
I mean, does it just depend on the way you save the new shape you would like to use, in which case I should manage to add my own shapes, or is is necessarily supported by a script ?
Hey SimTenero
Thanks for getting back to me. This all sounds very promising, I’ll certainly be getting this. I feel there’s a lot of experimenting coming up :)
Oh, and if you can do extra shapes, would a plane be possible with the ability to use cutout opacity? If I can mask a shape (say a cloud or a leaf) that would be great. With the ability to control the density of the particles all sorts of effects could be achieved this way. Thanks chum :)
I'm running dual 3GB GTX 780 Ti cards, and 32GB of system RAM, and while the preview animation/simulation using the default settings runs very quickly, if I reduce the size of the particles (water drop) the speed drops dramatically. I find the default size of 1.0 to be incredibly huge, especially since it doesn't have metaball properties (where colliding particles merge). Can the default size be reconfigured by the user, so it doesn't have to perform that extra calculation at runtime, or is that hard-coded into the engine?
Then again, I'm also assuming that since the particle size is reduced, it's generating exponentially more of them than with the default setting to maintain the stream length, thus taking longer.
Also, is it actually using the CUDA cores to perform the calculations? If so, would enabling SLI be faster or slower? In my experience, enabling SLI slows down Iray considerably, but if I can run the simulation with SLI enabled and then perform the actual render with it disabled, that's do-able.
Lastly, do particles always originate at the same point of the emitter, regardless of speed and size? I haven't been able to do much with it yet, due to the long calculation time, but I thought I noticed that lower speeds (2.0) and smaller particle size (0.25) caused the point of origin to shift from the head of the arrow to further down the shaft. As I said, though, I could be mistooken on that.
That's strange about the particle size! The size should actually affect the simulation speed at all, but I'll check it out and make sure there's nothing weird going on! Increasing the Emits Per Second will definitely affect the speed though. The simulation doesn't use CUDA, so the SLI settings won't change anything.
The particles can either originate fromm a single point (When Emit from Single Pointis checked in the animation script), or from the emitter bounds. When Emit from a Single Point is unchecked, you can scale/resize the emitter and the particles will emit from different, random locatons inside. That's how you get things like rain, with a large X and Z scale, small Y scale.
Thanks for the reply. I'm 8 hours into a calculation and all I've changed from the default settings is the Velocity (down to 3.0) and the Scale (down to 0.5), so it's got me curious.
8 hours?! Wow, something is probably up. Do you have a lot of colliders selected? If so, any chance you are colliding with an environment?
The reason I ask; Sometimes environments will exist as single meshes/objects so that, for example, all 4 walls, ceiling, and floor are one object instead of multiple separate objects. When that's the case, the particles always "think" they are colliding with the room, and check for collisions against the room geometry. I've got a bit on this in the guide, but in those cases, just placing plane primitives in place of the walls/ceiling/floor can dramatically speed things up.
That may not be the case in your simulation, but worth pointing out regardless :-D. Even on a modest PC simulating hundreds of particles for hundreds of frames, 8 hours seems too long.
I have a question about the script: after calculation I wanted to change some option in the parameters tab, like particles per second. But when I start the simulation script, the partoicle numbers doesn't Match my choice... It will follow the parameters values or the slider numbers?
The same happens with the collisions value...
I let it finish when I went to work (12 hours ago) and it was at about 87% at 5:30pm Central Time. The posts here aren't time-stamped, so I don't know when my last was - between 5pm and 5:05 anyway.
Only colliders are a G2F and a short hair, so the hair may have been the problem, since that was mentioned previously. The stream was aimed at the body, but did cascade up to and over the hair.
I'll try it again without the hair as a collider, and adjust the velocity so it doesn't go that high.
I did a test previously that did not reach the hair, with the smaller particles and such mentioned earlier, and the stream hit right about the Abdomen, and calculated a lot faster, so now I'm sure it was the hair causing the slow-down.
However, I did want to mention that the particle stream passed between the Adbomen1 and Ab2 joints, through the figure. It may have been due to the way these joints are posed (one bent back, one bent forward - preset pose).
I've got strange behaviour... With any particle amount, with any emitter, with any kind of settings... Always only about the 10% of generated particles are used in the scene, the remaining 90% will lay motionless on the bottom of the scene...
It's a bug or I have to do something precise to use all the particles?
*EDIT*
Sorry, forgot to say that in the image I set 500 particles and at that point of animation, particles stops appearing. The already appeared particles complete their animation correctly.
Yes, they are time stamped...hover your cursor over the date (under your avatar/icon in your post) and a small box will popup with the full date and time of the post....and if you click on the date, it will reload the page with that post being the final part of the URL so you can post it as a direct link to that particluar post.
Ah, thanks. 4:49pm, so yeah, close enough.
Aww! Sorry, only now I notice that I didn't gave the particle the right amount of frames to work! Forget about it!
Anyway (and this time I'm pretty sure!) I can't have the particles impact a complex figure like Genesis... The most of the particles just pass through the model as nothing is in their way, despite the long time spent in calculations. I also tried to put simple meshes like spheres or cubes inside the model but they get ignored as the rest of the parent figure! This seems to happen more often if the emitter moves a bit from its initial spot (I have parented the emitter to a whipped cream spray can, in the scene a girl tries to spray the cream on her brother's face and head, they struggle a bit in the action)
Yep, that was the first thing I was going to ask you to take a look at
. I'd recommend always padding out your animations with at least one extra life-time worth of frames, at least as you're getting started (so if your particle lifetime is 1 second, and your FPS in the timeline is 30FPS, add 30 frames to the animation to give it time for everything to finish up).
If particles are passing through colliders, the first things to check are velocity and FPS. Higher FPS in the animation timeline will yield more accurate results (but will take more time). Try using your priomitives as colliders (and make sure not to use the objects they are replacing, Genesis in this case. Deselect those and just use the primitives). Then try either lowering your velocity a little bit, or raising the FPS to 60, or some combination of both.
If particles are traveling very fast and the FPS is too low, there is a chance that, from the simulations perspective, they never actually hit the object.