Hasta La Motion!

We’re using renderman (RMS) and our programmer wrote a ray marching shader to make our particles look like dust with blobbies. Unfortunately there is a bug in RMS and we don’t have the time to write a few plug-ins to get around it and still meet the deadline.

While rendering with renderman would be ideal, we can use Mental ray or maya software since the dust is blowing across a surface. So we wouldn’t need to calculate displacments, just render the dust and catch soft shadows on the base geo.

Right now we have 20 separate particle simulations to show different kinds of movement in the dust. We were planning on exporting these as RIB, and then having renderman load them all in at rendertime and apply the shader. Since we can’t do that now, we need an alternate method for creating the dust look from our 20 simulations.

I was thinking of maybe going old school and using sprites, but I would need to somehow pass the PP color info for each particle to the sprite so I could tint it. The particles are inheriting color at birth from an image and need to have that specific color. Sprites would also render very fast, even though we’d need to create a single image or animation of the dust for the sprites, we could do more tests and tweaks because of render speed.

We considered using maya fluids, but they render very slow, and we would need to connect our particles and try and color the voxels based on particle color which may be more tricky for 20 simulations and quite time consuming to tweak and render.

At any rate, any info would be highly appreciated. We have about 12 days to meet the deadline and are open to any and all suggestions to get this done.

Thanks