an idea i had. in the shape operator, or as a seperate one, a procedural drip.
at rest its a sphere. when it moves, a "tail" stretches out along the direction of travel. this could change length depending on velocity, with some range/max stretch controls.
only technical issue i see is ram usage with all those non-instanced shapes. could maybe be mitigated by having a discrete number of "steps" in the shape change, maybe with a spinner to change number so controlling ram usage.
i got this idea as i was struggling trying to do droplets with particle tails, meshed with frost. at slow speeds this works great, but at some points i have spray flicked off an object. at high speeds, the tail of paticles gets too spread out to mesh, and only increasing the substeps to insane levels allows the trailing birthed particles to keep up with main one. this slows things to an absolute crawl.
im sure there are workarounds using bindings etc, but a simple "drip" shape would remove a crapload of messing around.
im guessing there may be a way to do this manually, by having a set of custom drip shapes and using the velocity of the particle to direct particles to different shape operators, and aligning along motion vector, but thats way above my head at this stage, and again, a procedural shape operator would fix it much more simply.
another novel feature would be to align the drip to direction of travel *and* the surface its on, so you could have a "flatten base" option for drips so they sit properly on a surface instead of intersecting.
is the above doable?
not in time for my deadline i expect
at rest its a sphere. when it moves, a "tail" stretches out along the direction of travel. this could change length depending on velocity, with some range/max stretch controls.
only technical issue i see is ram usage with all those non-instanced shapes. could maybe be mitigated by having a discrete number of "steps" in the shape change, maybe with a spinner to change number so controlling ram usage.
i got this idea as i was struggling trying to do droplets with particle tails, meshed with frost. at slow speeds this works great, but at some points i have spray flicked off an object. at high speeds, the tail of paticles gets too spread out to mesh, and only increasing the substeps to insane levels allows the trailing birthed particles to keep up with main one. this slows things to an absolute crawl.
im sure there are workarounds using bindings etc, but a simple "drip" shape would remove a crapload of messing around.
im guessing there may be a way to do this manually, by having a set of custom drip shapes and using the velocity of the particle to direct particles to different shape operators, and aligning along motion vector, but thats way above my head at this stage, and again, a procedural shape operator would fix it much more simply.
another novel feature would be to align the drip to direction of travel *and* the surface its on, so you could have a "flatten base" option for drips so they sit properly on a surface instead of intersecting.
is the above doable?
not in time for my deadline i expect