spawning cached particles

[Bohusz]

Hi, Right now I`m looking a solution for spawning large-scale of Christmas trees popping from under the snow. I have set up with physyx tree and grain particles for snow and I need to spawn them with some offset. They will be far soo I just need to reuse one tree. And here is a problem. I try to cache the whole shape and grain particles in one tycache file. Then I put that tycache as a shape operator reference.  The first thing is that it kills my ram and second it`s not a good optimized solution. I was wondering if there is any way to force tyflow to see grain particles as a particle, not a shape, and receive position from other particle.
 I created a simple test scene with 2 flows. One is just particles with some turbulence and the second flow with actor where particles from flow1 are distributed by it. But cant get any animation from it, guessing that actor is not designed for particles with changing id and count. Can you point me in some direction ? I`m a little stuck ;/

cheers !

[tyFlow]

Yea that's not really going to be a good solution....anything imported into a Shape operator is converted to a mesh so you lose instancing ability.

Closest solution I can think of would be to export your tree/grain sim as a VRay Proxy, then scatter the VRay Proxies using particles using the Export Particles operator. It has a MAXScript rollout that you can use to tune each proxy's animation offset to a particle custom float value, allowing you to offset the animation for each proxy. Of course, this solution requires VRay...but ultimately whatever solution you use is going to be renderer-dependent because this is a task that will definitely require instancing.

[Bohusz]

Yea that's not really going to be a good solution....anything imported into a Shape operator is converted to a mesh so you lose instancing ability.

Closest solution I can think of would be to export your tree/grain sim as a VRay Proxy, then scatter the VRay Proxies using particles using the Export Particles operator. It has a MAXScript rollout that you can use to tune each proxy's animation offset to a particle custom float value, allowing you to offset the animation for each proxy. Of course, this solution requires VRay...but ultimately whatever solution you use is going to be renderer-dependent because this is a task that will definitely require instancing.

Thanks, Tyson for guide. I will look into your solution. In meantime I made setup with vornoi fractured geo for snow in far distance, it's light weigh so shape operator is working fine. I`m wondering if it`s possible to have some buildin functions to set offset etc without maxscript in vrayproxy workflow. But it`s not a problem at all to write some simple expressions after all.  Thanks