Particle Tools

• New Colliders:
  • Added "Collider: Kineme3D Object" patch — collides against the surface of a Kineme3D mesh
  • Added "Collider: Quad" patch — collides against a single quad; easier to use than the "Collider: Triangle Structure" patch
• New Renderers:
  • Added "Render: Structure" patch — outputs a structure suitable for GLTools
  • Added "Render: Kineme3D Objects" patch — renders a Kineme3D Object at every particle
  • Added "Render: Textured" patch — simple renderer which adds support for a single texture
  • Added "Render: VBO" patch — renders points, lines, triangles, or quads
• New Objects:
  • Added "Object: Boid" patch — implements the Craig W. Reynolds boid algorithm
  • Added "Object: Gravitate" patch — implements particle-to-particle inverse-square gravitation
• Added "Backface Culling" option for all colliders
• Some performance optimizations
• Fixed compatibility with PerformanceInspector
• Fixed "Motion: Shear" setting when using "Render: Standard"
• Fixed ports to allow publishing and use with "Input Splitter" and "(De)Multiplexer" as a Virtual Port
• Fixed crash related to updating Settings panels while the composition is stopped
• Fixed crash related to removing a live object from the Scene or an Emitter
• Fixed crash related to removing a live object from an Emitter of Emitters
• Fixed rendering of collision meshes when using "Render: Standard"
• Improved force rendering — more forces now honor the Color property
• Renamed most patches to be more intuitive and to take up less space in the composition editor

Help guide the future of ParticleTools by participating in our usability poll.

Some minor improvements to our Particle Tools.

Changes include:

• Fixed GL Context-setting bug that caused ParticleTools to crash in VDMX (and probably in a lot of other situations). Thanks to mrray and magnetmus for troubleshooting, and to cwright for the actual fix.
• Added "Force: Explosion" patch.
• Made some minor GL rendering performance improvements --- dropped some of the unused texture manipulation stuff, and took some other shortcuts.
• Enabled some additional compiler optimizations.
• Included both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the patches.

This is the first public release of our "Particle Tools". This set of patches provides an object-oriented interface for building dynamic particle systems.

Screenshots after the break.

[Note: If you're a beta tester and not a Kineme3D Alpha tester, please delete /Library/Frameworks/KinemeCore.framework before installing this plugin.]