Hi all,

I created a simple flock system but when I used copy sop to randomize my animation with the help of stamp function, render time increased much higher and view port performance decreased much higher than using particle instance. The problem is that I can not randomize my animation in particle instance method. Is there anything like stamp function for particle instance ???

if your animation is "transformation' based then yes
if your animation is ‘deformation’ then no.

what this means is that you can randomize transformations on point instances but not deformation…

I dont know . My object is a fish that I want to randomize its tail movement based on particles speed. I need a function like point() to get particle speed and apply it to the bone movement frequency . . .

you'd use the instancepoint() function

but it doesn't work to randomize the deformation
you can still use it but you'll get the exact same tail motion…which might be OK…depending on what you're doing…

thank you arctor. As you said I got exactly the same tail motions. Maybe I create different fishes instead of one and then randomize the instance object based on IDs…

what I've done in the past is use 3-4 different characters, each with slightly different animation
then use 3-4 instance objects, each using a portion of the particles

this way you get some differentiation between the animations…
it's not perfect but it's better (less ram etc) than the copy sop

I recall stamping/CHOPs working with Bone rigs… but that was a while ago and I might not be remembering clearly

Thank you arctor. yes it worth to make different characters.
I think stamping/CHOPs works same as stamp/COPy node and it can not be used for particle instancing… :?

Well, yeah, you'd have to bake our your cycles for the actual render but it'd be a quick way to generate quite a few different cycles. You only need about 20 (sometimes less) differences in a crowd to avoid spotting repetitions…

Cheers,

Peter B

yeah I think so. Maybe we see some improvements about instancing in H13

Im looking at loading up a looping animation for a flock, but want to vary the timeoffset for the animation on the instances, is this possible?
I was trying the $F+instancepoint() in a time shift sop, but instancepoint() only works at object level so im a bit stuck on how to do this?

edit:
Dont worry, I solved it!
Used instancepoint() in the filename of a Delayed Load Geo Shader.
Works great!
No more 500+mg IFD files!