Point limitations...can be easily fixed

Well, I had a good look at it. The snowflakes are points, each point is created on the fly by the particle generator. There is a way to gradate the colors - what a great feature! I'll be making good use of it! Being able to cycle through colors is a godsend!

So far I haven't been able to change the opacity of the point through the object opacity animation, and I haven't been able to change the color of the point through the object color animation. So I was assuming that this is a limitation of the point object.

I did a bit of fiddling with the material settings, and with the color/alpha stuff.

The best "point" particle would be one where you basically have an alpha channel (in this case the shape of the snowflake), and a plain material (that you can change the colors of to suit). What you do is have the white material with the alpha channel. There are three different types of alpha - 1. material alpha channel, and 2. object opacity.

Of course, I'm trying to change 2 (object opacity) in this case the opacity of the actual point particle.

I tried the same thing with the sphere and I found that changing the object opacity via animation was possible, and everything looked snazzy. I could change the object color (diffuse) via animation with my own gradient and everything. But unfortunately I couldn't do the same thing with the point (snowflake).

I'm hoping that Mike might implement some way of changing the opacity and diffuse color of points. I'm almost certain there's an easy way to achieve it.

Regards
Ben

Hi Ben,

I think I may have requested similar things a while back, but if I remember correctly (and that is never a sure thing...) the point objects are a hardware rendered object, so I believe there was only so much that could be done with them.

I did use an alpha chanel map on the point "snowflakes" in the Eclipse scene, but since they don't tumple, I wasn't terribly pleased with them. I ended up using a crossed plane for better snowflakes and interspersed the "cheap" point ones with the more cpu intensive X plane objects.

Sue

Hmmm, that's a pretty good idea! I think it will be possible to change the opacity on point objects (it's changing the size that's a big problem, few cards support that, since particle systems are rendered as a single object). I'll have to take a look. I'll add this to the wish list and see what I can do.

Regards,
Mike

I'm happy to report that Projectiles, Particle Systems, and Plane Particle Systems now have an Opacity over time setting.

This will be in the next patch.

Regards,
Mike

Mike , you're faster than Speedy Gonzales...:lol