Playing around with particles (not related to the LHC in any way)

Now for yet another lookie at our potent arsenal of tools. This time I'm showing the Particle Editor, which is the app we use to do these nifty particle effects like fire, smoke and so on... you can get actually nice stuff by making use of this thing.

Truly, the Particle Editor is absolutely nothing new in our toolset. Those who picked the HPL tools pack to make a map for Penumbra (or just for the sake of obtaining them) certainly will have spotted a ParticleEditor.exe in there. You could create and handle each and every aspect in a particle system with it.

Great ol' Particle Editor

It worked like this: you designed a new Particle Method, added at least one particular Particle Emitter, and then set these up with stuff like beginning position, velocity, material, and so on., which would be employed by every particle produced by every emitter.
When you are generating the Particle System, you certain want to verify how it appears even though you are at it, and this was the major flaw of the old Particle Editor: you could do a preview of the Particle Method in the operates, but the strategy implied saving it to a file and loading it on a viewer system. This was completed automatically by the editor, so no sweat in there, but obtaining to save to a file + loading the viewer is a rather blocking combo (which means it makes you wait and only wait), which can last up to a couple of seconds.

Hey, wait a moment, this nutty is telling us to wait a couple of secs... what is the massive deal? you may possibly feel... but if you commit a couple hours functioning with it, you will notice you will have to do tons of previews (even more when tweaking tiny details), which translate to a lot of time wasted in the finish (not to mention the actual time spent checking the Particle Technique while it runs)... and also you will find it really annoying :P

Ahh, the old occasions.We spent a great time with each other,right? Wait, that was in fact a LOT of time.

So for HPL2 we decided to make a "new" Particle Editor, which fundamentally is the very same editor for HPL1, but with a genuinely übernice realtime preview. It still has some particulars that could be polished further, but it is very nice to operate with at the moment,and that is the essential thing.

And now it's time to see this in action: behold whilst I make some strange effect in this video :)



Hope you liked it. Will get back to the Particle Editor at some point in the future. As usually, you can voice your thoughts on this. I'll be pleased to know these :)