Hello,
I’m working on an atmosphere plate, creating dust particles that will eventually be incorporated into live action shots, and am currently figuring out the best way to generate the dust particles.
For simplicity’s sake, I’m using a MoGraph Cloner, with two separate Random Effectors (one for position and one for rotation), on a collection of five or six unique splines that are cloned, depending on the needs of the scene, sometimes going as high as a 10 x 10 x 10 grid of objects.
Now, so far, I’ve tried skinning this cat two different ways:
1. using a hair texture, applied directly to each spline (haven’t tried simply applying it to the cloner, will have to test that).
advantages: fast viewport.
disadvantages: slow start up on renders (calculating hair).
2. using a sweep object to “dress” a square along the spline while trying to minimize the number of polygons generated.
advantages: starts to render right away.
disadvantages: my viewport becomes too slow (I’m running on a machine dating back from 2009 with only 512MBs of VRAM, so…).
I created an xPresso to switch the sweep objects on and off. This helps, but after working on the scene for a few minutes, the system starts to slow down too much and I see the spinning wheel again.
My questions are:
A. Would applying the hair texture to the cloner instead of each spline help reduce the “calculating hair” time?
B. Most importantly, is there a better way to do this?
To help illustrate my poor explanation(s), I’ve included the scene file.
Thank you to anyone who can help / offer suggestions.
All the best,
Jerome
PS
I own and have used with great results Trapcode Particular, but am looking at different ways to get the job done.