Heya,
I'm having some issues with a project I'm working on and was wondering if anyone might be able to help me out.
I wasn't really sure if this comes under Dynamics or more Rendering, feel free to move it.
Some quick background...
I've made a toony explosion using Blobby Surface Particles with Toon Shaders, I'm using Maya 2008.
The main firey aspect of the explosion is a white/orange toon shader with a strong glow effect, there's also a large scale animated sphere with a hide source glow.
In amongst the firey globs is another particle system sorta like a shockwave/smoke effect.
It's white and grey and quite light on an opacity ramp (on the toon shader) it also feathers out to white at the edge and middle of the globes.
First of all, when I apply the shader to the particles... Per Particle Opacity and Per Object Opacity on the ParticleShape become useless. Only the opacity of the toon shader has effect... (as expected)
But if you can visualize the many spheres of "smoke" passing in front of each other and through each other as well as through the firey particle system... It's not quite creating the effect I was after. The opacity is adding up and you can see edges where they intersect...
What I was hoping was that it would figure out the entire blobby surface system as a singular object, then put the shader onto the entire object as a whole.
Is there such thing as Per-Object Shaders for particles?
The only way I can think around it right now is if I rendered the smoke system seperate with no opacity at all and put mental blank alpha matte shaders on all the other particle systems for when their particles move in front of the smoke... Then I could lower the opacity as a whole on the seperately rendered smoke.
But I'm having some trouble getting my head around that idea and if it's even the right effect.
I'll put up some screenies and examples of whats happening and what I was after tomorrow if it would help.
But another example is if you could imagine three spheres in line and slightly offset from one another so they overlap about half from the cameras point of view, (but aren't actually touching in 3D space)
Now imagine you had a shader that would make it black in the center and white on the outside of the sphere (facing angle or brightness with a ramp/toon shader)
Normally each sphere would be figured out seperately and you'd likely see the borders, is it possible to configure the shader so that from the cameras point of view (spheres overlapping) the three spheres bleed into each other and appear as one object.
Thats sort of what I'm after with the smoke... the entire particle system to be shaded as one object from the camera point of view.
Thanks in Advance!