Stylized Particles cycles.

Just doing some research using Advected Particles for cinematic i’m working over the next few months.

I used motion blur on some tests (not shown here) but it looked crap, it looked almost like it was skipping frames. Not sure why that heppened. Anyway heres some examples renders.

Same as second test but with less particles

Love the result ! :slight_smile:

That looks really cool! Is it going to be for sand/dirt effects or what?

thanks hdd.

@phoenix yes it will be for some dirt effects. Also some “mystical” like effects. Still haven’t got it to look how I like.

That wasn’t the original intention though. I wanted to use a lot of particles that are so small that you wouldn’t see that “sandy” effect, it would just look smooth. It gives a more “crisp” effect than hi res smoke.

However I didn’t know the particle limit was 10,000,000 per emitter in blender, and what I had in mind would need at least 20-40 millions. I’ve seen it done very will in other software. Theres a houdini user here who uses 100 million. which I think is too much of a stretch for blender haha, probably crash galore.

Perhaps I could do a “hack” and use two emitter together with a slightly delay/random to get more particles at once.

render/baking times are huge, but its not so much a problem since Its personal work.

You know - if you added some motion blur to those particles - you may get a reasonable approximation of smoke.

I did, I mentioned in the first post mo blur ended up making everything jerky so I had to remove. If you want I can upload the video with the issue?

well last night I rendered 20million particles, I took one particle emitter, and duplicated, and slightly offset it, and changed some random values. Unfortunately the sim itself didn’t look as planned, looks like a crappy loop with no variety. However it created some interesting shapes and the many particles make it looks smoother.

its rendered at very low samples (150) so i’m not sure if the grainy look is coming from the particles or the noise. I want there to be grainy ness when the smoke “thins out” but not so much when its thick.

My next sim will go for possibly 60millions. I’m curious as to how far I can push it, I’ll spend a lot more time on the actual sim and try to make something sexier.Then after that i’ll we do some test with emissions, and also explore of areas of the particle info node.

I will also render more samples just to see how it looks. Will vector blur work with particles?

I think this is a really impressive result.

Can you explain much more about particles setup. I’m totally noob about it :slight_smile:

Well i’d need more info, how much of a noob are you? :smiley: i’m a noob myself, still have a lot of things to figure out.However I can link to some good resources.

this is a good primer… http://simulate4d.com/2011/10/blender-2-60-guide-to-smoke-fire-simulation/

but for the stuff i’m doing here, you need a lot of ram.

i’m currently in the middle of trying to render 50million particles, which is more than blenders limit (on performance) and it’ll probably 3-4 days to complete the render. After that i’m back to smaller tests.

Awesome stuff! Looks like I’ll have to start saving for more RAM :smiley:

Witchcraft!

heres something that didn’t go according to plan,lol.

how much ram did this use

I wasn’t really paying attention i’m afraid. I don’t think it was over 20 at its peak. I’m currently baking a generic ink drop with 10million icospheres, i’ll try and remember to write down the peak ram usage for you (if its successful)

heres something from today thats only 5million, the particles are set to 0.0001. The point is for them to be so small that it just looks like a regual smoke sim. However, we need at least 10million to lose some of the graininess, unless thats what you are going for. This was really just for seeing what I could do with vector blur,and it shows, I didn’t spend much time on the sim “design”. Blur killed some of grainyness which is good.

everything is done at half res so far, with 250 samples.

attempted inkdrop. fell asleep, couldn’t grab ram details.

VEry close with the ink drop. Shame it seems to be pouring in. Can you suspend a volume of particles then dump them in as a group?

Hi,
Very beautiful results.

For the 10 millions limit, I think it is a limit from old ages (OK in computer science it may be only 5 years).
In the documentation http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Physics/Particles ‘Each particle system may contain up to 100.000 particles.’. Very old ages (I don’t know how to correct the documentation).

With a noob search on the code (GNU/linux grep -r 10000000 ), I first think it would be easy to change in the file
source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_particle.c, under the comment
/
This limit is for those freaks who have the machine power to handle it. /
/
10M particles take around 2.2 Gb of memory / disk space in saved file and /
/
each cached frame takes around 0.5 Gb of memory / disk space depending on cache mode. /
RNA_def_property_range(prop, 0, 10000000);
For information the other limit of 250 for grid reslution is just some lines under:
RNA_def_property_range(prop, 1, 250); /
~15M particles in a cube (ouch!), but could be very usable in a plane */

but there is perhaps a limit when editing numbers, see ./editors/util/numinput.c and/or in release/scripts/modules/rna_info.py and/or other files.
I didn’t compile to test.

Looking at the incredible numbers of particles, couldn’t you just have tiny spheres using a shader that fades to transparent at glancing angles to make it like an omnidirectional halo, you would be able to make each particle a little bigger at least at the cost of some higher rendertimes and some slight bias?

3point, i have tried dropping a while bunch at once, it started out ok, but then ended up a mess, still trying to figure it out.

BoFZeVampire i'm not a programmer, so i'm not sure how to go about what you are saying. However, blender can barely handle 2 separate systems with 10mil, so I fail to think that it can one system with 20 million anyway.

I had 5 separate systems with 10 mil, and blender couldn’t move. and yes the blend file was something like 8gb and took about 10mins to open.

ace
. it just seems to me, with a particle obj size of 0.003, anything that isn’t a diffuse shader just looks bad. Or will just appear black, like sss or transparent. I even tried light path absorb shader and got black.

The shader is applied to each particle rather than looking at the particles as a whole form “as if they where meshed”. What cycles would need is something like krakatoa http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/krak-shading/

I’m not sure if the implementation of volumes in cycles will save me here, first cycles would need particle self shadowing, rather than using dupli objects.

How about just a little very little motion blure… so it kinda delate that noise…