These movies are made with a setup I created for doing particle morphing effects in Houdini. The initial idea for the setup is from Peter Claes’ technical dvd, but it has been greatly expanded to take color and normals into account. It also allows the user to specify attributes to use to blend between color/motion/normals (such as distance to target, age of particle, length of time in group, etc), which are hooked up to ramps for a great deal of control. I may post a screen capture of how the OTL works soon.
Technical Repository
Adam Swaab – Designer, Animator, and VFX Director
Technical Repository
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Would this not be possible in C4D?
It is possible, but not at the same level of control that Houdini gives you. Inheriting particle color can also be done using a hack approach with Mograph. Also, try doing this with a million particles and you’ll fry C4D. Houdini will handle it quite well.
Hey Adam, did you scrap the destruction plugin for C4D? It looked great!
Well, I wouldn’t say scrapped, but I definitely have made the decision to stop working on it for awhile, especially considering there are now several other tools out there that do similar object breaking, and they have made much more progress (and their plugins are more stable) than I was able to get to.
I may get back into it, I may not. One tool that I may write which came from this plugin is a virtual slice modifier like they have in 3DS Max and Houdini (basically a clipping plane). I already have the code to do this – it just has to be encapsulated into a deformer object.
Currently, I am pursuing more artistic, rather than technical pursuits in my free time these days.
Bummer dude.. the only other one I know of is http://www.codeworkers.de/garage-plugins.html and it’s still in R&D as well. 😦 beat him to the punch Adam!!
Any chance of you posting that screen capture of how the OTL works? Or quick tut?
Some of the concepts are covered in Peter Claes’ Technical Effects DVD:
http://www.3dbuzz.com/xcart/product.php?productid=58
Since I learned the effect that way, I don’t feel completely comfortable sharing his info… The DVD is absolutely worth the price. I highly recommend it.
I won’t get into specifics, but for morphing, you use a vop pop to directly state the velocity of each particle. This involves assigning goal positions and taking initial velocity and drag forces into account.