Particle Rendering

General

In the flag "Rendering" of a particle emitter some presettings are adjusted which concern the drawing of the particles and do not associate directly to the formation and "living" of the particles.

Type of particle

(A change directly restarts the particle-system!)

Particles can be drawn as quadratically textured polygone or in form of lines:

• Quads draw a quadrate around the position of the particle which can be coated with a texture. Every particle can use a different section of the chosen texture.
• Lines are drawn from the last position of a particle to the currentl position. This means the lines are the longer the faster the particle moves.

Texture of particle

The look of the particle is defined by this texture. The texture may be colored and can copntain an alpha-channel. However the alpha-channel will not be considered in every drawing-mode (look beneath).

Important: A texture has to be defined in the editor. The preset texture is only used to present something if a new emitter is created but it will not be saved in the VED or VIS file.

Partition

The used texture can be disposed in "tiles" in horizontal (U) and vertical (V) direction. If quads are adjusted as a particle type, every particle uses a random tile as texture. Thereby variety is created. Besides there is a determination, how many of the arising texture-parts should be used (starting with zero continuously and numbered line by line). The adjustment -1 integrates every texture-parts.

Tile-blending

Instead of assigning every new particle a random part of the texture (which will be kept by this one), it can be cross-blended between the texture-parts by and by. This feature can be activated through the checkbox Activate tile-blending and can be navigated by the curve beside.

Modus of Drawing

The modus of drawing defines how the texture of a particle is to be associated with the background during the calculating.

• Opaque - the background is repainted (The opacity will be managed by the alpha-channel).
• Additive - Color of the particle will be added to the background. The effect will be limited to the maximum brightness (white).
• Smooth - The color of the particle will be added to the background, but the less the brighter the background is.

The adjustment Additive creates an interesting "burn-out" or "outshine"-effect is generated where a lot of particles overlap. Just try it!

The alpha-channel is considered only in the drawing-modus opaque. Particles will be sorted along the Z-axis which extends the calculating procedure.

Hint: If Additive or Smooth are adjusted as thedrawing-modus, the parts of a particle which are the darkest seem to be the most translucent. In most cases it is a good substitute for "real" alpha-shading.

Export/Import

The feature export saves the emitter(!) inside a *.PAR-file. This can be exchanged with other users or appended to the own collection.

The feature import loads a *.PAR-file and displaces the current emitter.