Bake particle to animation

[cxtian39]

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Is there an efficient way to bake particles generated by the game engine to an shp? My thought is placing it on single color tiles and then using a screen recording tool. Is this the right direction to go?

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

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i don't get it
It's like asking how to bake apples to a plate, because your floor has a camera pointing on it.

What do you want to do?
If you mean with SHP an animation, then yes you can attach an animation to a tile. See how waterfalls work.

Though no clue again what a particle has to do with any of that.

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[cxtian39]

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Because a particle system has much worse performance than a single animated shp?

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[Lin Kuei Ominae]

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what?
Could you clear up the first post and actually explain what you want to do, before throwing in another technical term?

There are
art.ini
-animations
-debris (also animated but more a "physical" object that can collide with stuff like the ground)

-animations can play unlimited
-debris always have a limited lifetime, as they always hit the ground at some point.

rules.ini
-particle systems
-particles generated by particle systems (particles can't be generated in any way without a particle system AFAIK)

-warheads that can play animations/debris and start a particle system


"terrain".ini
-tiles that can have an animation attached

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[Mig Eater]

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He wants to take screenshots/video of a particle system ingame, then convert the images into a shp animation. So he can then have the same gfx effect but without the lag of the particle system.

I dont see why you'd want to go though the extra work when you could easily copy & pate together an animation similar to what the game will produce in an image editor. Making a new animation in a 3D program would be even better.

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[Lin Kuei Ominae]

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oh wow, i would never have guessed this.
But makes sense now that you mention it.

My guess he wants a tile to show a certain animation or particlesystem. Like using the FLH finder anims.

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[G-E]

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No LKO the background tiles of one colour are so they can be stripped from the resulting image.

I don't think he considered the translucency blending of particlesystems however.

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[cxtian39]

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1) Is it a way to render a gif sprite in 3dsmax so that it looks exactly the same as you view it? I use the gif as texture of a plane and that plane is always facing to the camera, no lighting, but it renders a little bit darker than the original. Is it a way to tell 3dsmax "Hey this is 2d sprite not a 3d object! Don't apply lighting, shadowing, etc" like game engine like Unity.

[Mig Eater]

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Right click on the plane & select object properties, you can disable receive/cast shadows. You'll have to add your own lights & play around with the settings to get it just right though.

I hope you're not using 3DS Max just to convert the gif into separate frames..?

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[cxtian39]

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I try to merge the firing muzzle & particles with the aircraft and render it as one shp because in Ra2/YR flying unit would cover all animations/particles no matter what.

I'm trying to use original ra2 muzzle and smoke because I don't know how to make one from scratch that looks ra2-ish.

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

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use ImageShaper
-import the unit SHP into the left column
-duplicate the frames that will become the firing frames
-put in the middle column the animated pixel/muzzle flash anim
then let imageshaper merge the animated pixel/muzzle flash to the firing frames of the unit

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[cxtian39]

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Positions of muzzle would be a headache if I don’t put them into the 3D scene. They are different in all 32 facings in terms of 2d canvas coordinates.

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

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if you set the material setting "Self-Illumination" to 100, the material ignores shadow effects and is lit on all facings by 100%.
If you then also set the object that shouldn't be affected by lighting to exclude that object from all light sources, the rendered object/material should look exactly like the source image.

However, you should really try to create the desired effects in 3dsmax.
RA2 muzzle flash and particle systems are so inferiour to what you can achieve in 3ds max.
The Particle Systems "PF Source" is extremely versatile and even in the default setting almost the same as what you get from the ingame particle system.

Muzzle flash:
-create a sphere and move the pole vertex away to give it a peak
-move some other vextex on the side outwards
now you have the shape of a muzzle flash
-give the sphere a material with a Fallout map and make the inner area yellow/white, the outer yellow/red
set self-illumination on that material to 100%
-animate the sphere's size over 2 or 3 frames so it instantly appears and shrinks rapidly again

play a bit with the values and you have in 10min a nice muzzle flash anim

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