OrbazTechnologies > Particle Flow Tools

3dsmax 5.1|6.x|7.x

Particle Flow Tools plug-ins for 3ds max.

Particle Flow Tools is a set of operators and other software tools created by the original author of Particle Flow for extending its capabilities. Some of these are improved versions of the features in Particle Studio, Atomizer, Glider and Spray Master plug-ins, while others are brand new, designed to the specifications of top Hollywood special-effects artists who use them in movie production. You can drop the Particle Flow Tools plug-ins into your 3ds max installation and instantly start using its powerful capabilities to organize and ease your workflow, as well as create amazing particle effects that were previously impossible or would have required extensive scripting.

Particle Flow Tools consist of freeware and commercial software.
The commercial software is organized into Boxes.

Particle Flow Tools: Box #1 operators come in three basic categories:

Painting: Interactively place particles exactly where you want them. These include Particle Paint, Birth Paint, Placement Paint, Birth Texture, and Mapping Object.

Groups: Organize and categorize particles system. These include Group Operator, Group Selection, and Split Group.

Utilities: Speed your workflow and extend Particle Flow's capabilities. These include Particle Flow Utility, Utility Operator, Preset Flow, Initial State, and Lock/Bond.

Particle Flow Tools: Freebies

An assortment of operators provided by Orbaz Technologies to Particle Flow users that are available for free download. These include Camera Culling, Camera IMBlur, Copy Out, Display Script, Stop, and Stop Gradually. Other operators are coming soon.

>Painting

Have you ever wanted to put a leash on your Particle Flow particles and show them exactly where to go? Now the new Painting tools in Particle Flow Tools gives you the power to precisely control your particles placement and movement. The Painting tools let you easily accomplish effects such as fire spreading throughout a room, jumping from location to location. You can restrict the flames only to flammable objects, keeping them away from the rest.

The Painting tools are:

Particle Paint
Lets you sow particle seeds directly on object surfaces, using a freehand painting tool or standard 3ds max splines. Then use the additional Paint operators to place particles in the seeds' locations, either at birth or later during the particle animation. This versatile tool gives you five different rollouts of controls, including the ability to restrict painting to specific objects or faces, position particles on or above the painted surface, orient the particles, set stroke timing, and much more. Particle Paint remembers the timing you use to paint the strokes, and lets you apply it to the particle animation.

Birth Paint
Generates new particles along strokes according to their timing. This makes it easy, for example, to create skywriting-type effects, not to mention custom fireworks that couldn't exist in the real world.

Placement Paint
Lets you position and orient particles according to the Particle Paint data, on either an instantaneous or ongoing basis. Options include the ability to synchronize the particle order with the paint timing, and gradually change particle orientation from the current orientation to that of the paint data.

Birth Texture
Lets you create new particles based on the parameters of an animated texture on the emitter objects. Controls include timing, quantity, positioning of particles on vertices/faces/edges, emitter objects, scaling, sub-material options, and mapping channels. There's even a Latency control for ultra-smooth particle emission. An example of Birth Texture usage is generating spray from the tips of ocean waves, where they're colored white.

Mapping Object
Lets you derive particle mapping from a reference object or objects on an instantaneous or ongoing basis. You can also transition from the original particle mapping to that of the reference object(s) over time or distance.

 

>Utilities

The Particle Flow Tools utilities let you harness the power of Particle Flow in a variety of ways:

Lock/Bond
A powerful test that attaches particles to an object in a rigid or flexible manner, with control of the particles' position and orientation. Lock/Bond also gives you dampening options and lets a strong force break the attachment and send particles to the next event. This lets you, for instance, spray particles onto a moving (e.g., wavy) surface and make them stick, or shake drops of water off an object.

Initial State
Lets you freeze a particle system at any point in the animation and then use that snapshot as the starting point for another particle system. If you ever need to begin a particle simulation with a complex arrangement that would be difficult to create manually, Initial State lets you do it easily and quickly.

Particle Flow Utility
This 3ds max utility gives you four functions:
Clean up hidden factors that can slow down the particle simulation; reset the Particle View display so you can see the particle flow; synchronizes the particle system elements with the 3ds max layering system; and Preset Manager lets you save and manage different particle systems as presets, available for instant loading with the Preset Flow operator.

Preset Flow
Gives you instant access, within Particle View, to any particle system you've saved as a preset with Preset Manager.

Utility Operator
Provides access within Particle View to some of the Particle Flow utilities, including Clean Up and Synchronize Layers.

 

>Groups

The Groups tools in Particle Flow Tools give you new ways to organize and control your particle system. The standard Particle Flow plug-in lets you identify, track, and manipulate only two subsets of particles throughout the system: selected or unselected. So, if you wanted to work with three or more different groups, you were out of luck ... until now, that is! With Groups, you can set up as many different subsets as you like, manipulate them with operators from a different event, and even operate on a group remotely from a completely different event, and determine whether to send articles to the next event based on group membership and selection status.
The tools are:

Group Selection
Define and identify a unique subset of particles for further manipulation with the Group operator and Split Group test. Group Selection gives you a number of ways to specify whether or not the group is selected, including location (inside or outside a bounding volume), particle property such as ID or age, a random percentage, and even Boolean operations between two groups!

Group Operator
This powerful operator lets you apply any event's tests and operators to any group created with Group Selection, no matter where in the particle flow they currently reside. This lets you modify a subset of particles without the need to split the particles off to another event.

Split Group
This test lets you identify a group to split off and decide to send it to the next event based on whether or not it's selected.

 

>the free evaluation version here

> Orbaz web site

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