Hey is there any way of particles fading with age? Like a ramp - texture to particle age sort of thing?
I’m currently using the attenuate by distance and blowing my particles away to fake it… which works, but only in very specific setups…
put a point SOP after the particle SOP
in point ALPHA put an expression
1-smooth($LIFE,.5,1)
particle will fade off in the last half of its life
same for PSCALE
hi , thks.
I’m not able to get that to work over here. Still trying to get Python syntax to stick in my brain solidly. Doesn’t me.inputPoint.life[0] just return max life expectancy, rather than “current life left” '?
I’m trying to fade out over time, and it’s working with the Point SOP, with the technique in this post (I’m using 1-(me.inputPoint.life[0]/me.inputPoint.life[1])) to get a normalized time. However, it seems like this is really expensive. My frame rate tanks when I get a few thousand particles going. Am I missing something? Is there a better way to do this?
Also for some reason, going from particlesSOP to chops, calculating the life in chop and merging the original particleSOP and the chop via a choptoSOP is more than 2x as fast as simply using the pointSOP
Heya- thanks for the reply! I don’t have a count right now, but it’s a few thousand particles. I was hoping to avoid GLSL (mostly due to lack of experience), but I know for big operations like this, it would speed things up dramatically. Thanks for the advice about going out to a CHOP- it seems pretty odd that that’s more efficient, but I believe you!