OTOY Forums

I have 3 mil particles that were done with Houdini then exported to realflow bin format and imported into an X-particle cache. It works beautifully - except that I would like to add some particle color variation, but when I use the Octane material on the cached emitter the particles do not keep their individual color but everything "flickers" and the particles continually swap colors.

Using X-particles 3 and the latest Octane plugin.

colors are indexed to particle order. I think this is a clue to understand what's happening

Janmansilver wrote:I have 3 mil particles that were done with Houdini then exported to realflow bin format and imported into an X-particle cache. It works beautifully - except that I would like to add some particle color variation, but when I use the Octane material on the cached emitter the particles do not keep their individual color but everything "flickers" and the particles continually swap colors.

Using X-particles 3 and the latest Octane plugin.

Hi mate,
I've done a short tutorial on how to achieve this effect.

https://vimeo.com/124982906

I hope this helps, should work with pre-cached simulations as well.

Thanks for tutorial, but it's not good for 3 millions particles. Octane will die due with lot of non-instanced objects. Only way to use particle engine or render instances for this situations

Hi thanks for your tutorial - great looking stuff, as mentioned I need to only be instancing particles/geo at rendertime or else my computer will explode due to the high particle count - it's a tough job simulating/rendering grain as one cannot "cheat" with meshing a few thousand particles to get something like water.

As suggested I will try and reimport the bin files to see whether or not they have retained their particle id's.

Another issue I'm having is that when I turn on motion blur with the imported particles, Octane becomes unresponsive and nothing happens for a long time (I have let it be for an hour or so without it getting further) I then had to "kill" the application before I could use it again.

Is there a limit with motion blur and large particle counts or is it simply my "potentially strange" particles?

thanks for the tutorial... and also for the hint about hdrlabs.

Janmansilver wrote:Hi thanks for your tutorial - great looking stuff, as mentioned I need to only be instancing particles/geo at rendertime or else my computer will explode due to the high particle count - it's a tough job simulating/rendering grain as one cannot "cheat" with meshing a few thousand particles to get something like water.

As suggested I will try and reimport the bin files to see whether or not they have retained their particle id's.

Another issue I'm having is that when I turn on motion blur with the imported particles, Octane becomes unresponsive and nothing happens for a long time (I have let it be for an hour or so without it getting further) I then had to "kill" the application before I could use it again.

Is there a limit with motion blur and large particle counts or is it simply my "potentially strange" particles?

what's particle count and what kind particle objects? i could run a few hundred thousands particle with particle engine. Where do you try it, in Live Viewer? I'm not sure about limit of render instances. But we have 32k nodes limit per node graph. What this means? When we made the objects as movable, each object will consumes 2-3 nodes. If you reach to this count, plugin can crash.