Monday, April 20, 2009

Emiter update.

TroY manged to find a bug or two with emitters. So setting normals should work now. Don't forget that for the object to be animated you must uncheck the static checkbox. Also Emitters are still "old" code in that only vertex's emit fluid and their normals are defined by the AoI object, so you need shading to be set for the object. Same link as always.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Selection Sets and Physics

I have now revamped part of the GUI work the why I would have always liked it to work. To make a long story short you can now set up parameters on a selection of objects or even a selection Set. This can make larger scenes much easier to work with.

There are however a few things you should know. If you selected a group of objects, then every selection set that is a subset of the current selection will also be selected. Also if you selected a selection set --all its selection set subsets are also selected.

Now the tricky part is when the editor is disabled. This means that all the objects that are selected do NOT have the same parameters or type. Or alternatively the type selected from the drop down is different. At this stage you can choose to set all of the current selection to what the editor has via the set to selection button.

So anyway a little playing around should make things clear.

The other thing that has changed is the way other objects are handled. In particular soft-bodies. They now have there own iterative solver. Its not different at this stage, but uses a smaller time step from the rest of the simulation, and hence the whole simulation can proceed much faster (ie with larger time steps). You can control this with the internal reps parameters for soft-bodies. Higher means more internal iterations. However this won't solve all stability issues so smaller global time steps will still be generally required for fluid soft-body interactions.

The other nice change is that I now check to see if the soft body simulation is trying to use all the ram. At this point it throws an exception rather than just consuming every last Meg on your machine. In this case either increase the internal reps or reduce the time step.

Don't forget to delete the physics object on older scenes and recreate a new one.

Here it is