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Ravendark

Particle system help

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I am trying to create a particle system for a railgun like effect, the idea is to have 2 lines follow a missile like prop. The lines have a sinewave with a higher starting amplitude and a lower amplitude towards the lifetime end of the particle. Each trail? has a sine wave but are 180`degrees phase shifted.

 

I just dont seem to be able to create it with the particle system. TRAIL, STREAK aren't giving the wanted results if any, the only thing that comes close is the STREAK draw with the lightning modifier but that seems to not work when attached to a bone in the missile prop.

 

Something along the lines of this:

 

350px-DampedSine.png

 

I don't have enough experience with the particle system to get it to work, so any advice and help would be appreciated.

Edited by Ravendark

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Have an invisible bone attached to the missile prop, and animate this bone in Max. Attach the TRAIL or STREAK particle to the animated bone.

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Ye that was plan B. Just hoping plan A is feasible first. If not only so i get some better insight in particlesystems creation.

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The problem would still be that the sine wave would never collapse with Madin's method.

The most helpful method would probably to create a custom shader as a laser fx (a custom shader for a particle system which uses gpu draw could work too).

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Unfortunately that is beyond my current skillset.

 

But after experimenting some more on all this this evening, i get the feeling im trying to do something overly complicated for the nature of my railgun. Due to the speed of the projectile a lot of the subtle nuances get lost in on it. Maybe if it moved lot slower the effects cold be appreciated more. I've come to a result with the Trail draw that i can be content with, as i don't want the trail to linger to long after the projectile strikes, i'll probably add some clouds (ionization/EM effect like particles) that follow the same projectile and linger a tad longer.

 

I was able to more or less create a resembling sine wave with the lightning draw as it has attribute handles to tweak the frequency and amplitude. But i can not get it to follow a projectile(bone), but only get it to work through the FireFx attribute in the weapon coding.

Edited by Ravendark

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Yes, the lightning draw needs a start and end point and doesn't really behave as you described, which is why I haven't suggested it.

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