Hi There,
I'm generating smoke/fire via the “s**t load of particles method”, to speed up the process, I have the following setup:

- Simple Popnet with not that many particles cached out to disk
- Duplicate particles a number of times (they are sitting on top of each other for now).
- VopSop doing semi-clever jittering of each copy followed by Curl Noise (doing the noise after the jitter somewhat avoids the fuzz look)

I want to do the last part in a CVEX vopnet context… because I could then just let mantra chew on it and avoid writing out dozens and dozens of gigabytes to disk.
But I soon realized that CVEX doesn't do anything without somebody first coding in c++ the thing that asks for it (not me!!). So, for my cunning plan to work I need a geometry shader with a path to a cvex shop that will let me overwrite P.
Can anyone help? Seems like a fairly obvious use for cvex, no?

I tried displacement shader but annoyingly that doesn't work when you “render as points”

cheers
Serg

This is interesting… I'm not following how this will allow you to avoid writing the particles to disk though?

If you duplicate the particles before the cvex operation… doesn't the IFD still record the position of all those particles?

or are you planning to skip ifd generation and just render locally on one machine from the interface?

I haven't checked it out myself yet, but Mark Story seems to indicate the latest version of his “Cluster this” plugin at:
http://www.digitalcinemaarts.com/dev/clusterThis/index.html [digitalcinemaarts.com]
does something like this.

See this post on odForce (whole thread is probably worth a read for what your're doing):
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=8440&view=findpost&p=56235 [forums.odforce.net]

josh3light
This is interesting… I'm not following how this will allow you to avoid writing the particles to disk though?

Like this:
- the only thing you would write out is the low-rez popnet
- then duplicate it at object level
- each duplicate would have a Geometry shader that reads the same sequence from disk, and applies the cvex shader.
- for each duplicate, the cvex shader also be duplicated but would each have a different seed for the point jittering.

I have been following the “Cluster This” thread, maybe it works for this but unfortunately we run win64 and of course by sod's law there is no win64 version

But all this cvex stuff could be avoided if only we could run displacement shaders on “render as points” geometry…

FYI: The new release of the clusterThis DSO has all the hooks into CVEX you need to do what you're asking and much more.


8)

xionmark
FYI: The new release of the clusterThis DSO has all the hooks into CVEX you need to do what you're asking and much more.


8)

You sneaky, sneaky release person you :-D

:-) I'm still writing the announcement … almost there…