[Bf-committers] Some design questions on particle emission

[Roger Wickes]

np. I thought you needed to know the total amount of particles in advance. 

So yes, it would be even better, as an artist, to control the rate of flow, like a handle
on a garden hose, controlling a flow-rate input node 
which specifies the rate of particle emission over time.

very similar to the time node now, that feeds a math node to multiply that scalar value to some
number? That does eliminate the need to guesstimate how many primary particles you needed,
which to me was arbitrary as an artist but made perfect sense as a programmer.

 
if you need to allocate memory in advance for some reason, you can always look ahead, 
subject to the issue you identify.
--Roger




----- Original Message ----
From: Lukas Tönne <lukas.toenne at googlemail.com>
To: bf-blender developers <bf-committers at blender.org>
Sent: Mon, June 28, 2010 10:58:43 AM
Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Some design questions on particle emission

That's not the real problem here :)
If this was only about animating the emission rate your idea might
work (though there are better ways to do numerical integration). The
issue here is that there is _no_way_ to know the total amount of
particles as soon as customized emission events come into play.
Say, for example, a node spawns new particles when it collides with an
object. How would you determine the number of colliding particles and
therefore new particles spawned in advance?

However, after some discussion on IRC we decided it's probably best to
not invest much more time in recreating features of the current
particle systems, but instead work on a design for more flexible
node-based particles now.