CS Tools Latest Additions

Updated 12/03/07

New Tool "CS_Spriticles". A sprite-based particle system.

24. CS_Spriticles (Needs Thinking Particles installed)

What is it: It's basically a greatest hits of TP nodes blended in one simple tool particle sprite tool. It also auto detects the active camera for the sprites to always look at. I often want to use sprite particle systems but was always too lazy to build what I needed so I made this for an easy to grab and use tool.

General directions: You'll see I put a temporary circle material on it. Just replace that with the material of your choice then dial in the user sliders to get the result you want. For the 'Copy Motion' part of the user sliders, the tool itself (master null) should be in motion or the particles will have no motion to copy.

Props: HUGE thanks once again to Lennart(TCA Studios). He helped me with the Coffee code to auto-detect the active camera so the user wouldn't have to keep dropping the camera of choice into a linkbox. Also thanks to PerAnders, Srek, and JoelD, for unknowingly helping me by posting in old CGTalk threads about particles. Thanks to The Monkey for his 10 minute beta test.

Sliders:

Particle Group: This defaults to 'ALL'. But if you want separate groups in your scene then check the C4D docs on creating new particle groups. Then drop them in this box for individual control over multiple groups.
Birth Rate: How often particles are created
Emit Radius: This expands a circle in which particles emit from.
Spread: How much the particles spread out from the origin.

Speed: Speed at which particles travel away from the emitter
Speed variation: Self explanatory
Scale: Master scale
Scale over life (Grad bar): This defaults to zero->max->zero for a smooth growth and decay. But mess with it for interesting results. At minimum you can drag the white point back and forth to bias where the particles hit their growth peak.
Rotation: Since the particles always look at the cam this is just a pos and neg slider for Clockwise or counter clockwise rate.
Rotate from Velocity(Checkbox): When unchecked the particles have a constant rotation. When checked the speed of rotation is multiplied by the velocity. So the faster the particel, the faster it spins.

Gravity: Negative to make them lighter than air, positive to make them heavier than air.
Turbulence: The amplitude of the turbulence
Turbulent Freq: The complexity of the turbulence.

Copy Amount: Once again, the master null needs to be in motion to see any effect. This is how much the particles copy the master null's motion.
Copy Variation: How much the particles vary in the amount of motion copy
Direction Var: This will make some particles find new directions. So they copy the motion but in new paths.