Any tutorials on emitters?

acidchalk

Is there anywhere i can get a good tutorial on emitters? Like for smoke on a chimney on a tile for example. I'm having the worst time figuring out how to make one. I even tried opening up a tile with the emitter in it already
and replacing it with my tile and the smoke refuses to emit! It's driving me crazy. Thank you for your time.

TarotRedhand

I have an ancient one. Finding where I got it from took a lot of digging though. Finally found it on the wayback machine. Does this help? It is part of documentation for NWMax (and therefore NWGMax). Don't know how relevant it is to Blender.

TR

acidchalk

Thank you, i'll take a look as i am using nwmax

acidchalk

That is good stuff and helps with making new emitters from scratch, but the issue i'm having is that i don't know how to get my tile to start playing the emitter. like if i take an already working emitter out of a tile and parent it over to my new tile nothing happens. I must be missing a step somewhere that i can't figure out.

zordren3742

Yes I tried that with the chimney smoke as well. I will try to help you out with what I found out, here are some things you must have to make ANYTHING in a emitter show.

If birthrate is zero/0 nothing will show
If lifeExp is zero/0 nothing will show
If fps is zero/0 nothing will show
If alphaStart and alphaEnd are both zero/0 nothing will show

If any one of these conditions exist in your emitter settings nothing will show

In fact, if I am not mistaken all of these except for the alphaStart and alphaEnd must be at least 1 or 1.0, but I might be wrong, anyway they cannot be zero.

After that, time...and patience...lots of it.

I cannot remember which one from the OC city tiles smoke was zero, in fact I do not think that I did get the chimney smoke to work, this is just general settings you need to check to get anything to show on a emitter.

Ancarion

acidchalk said:

That is good stuff and helps with making new emitters from scratch, but the issue i'm having is that i don't know how to get my tile to start playing the emitter. like if i take an already working emitter out of a tile and parent it over to my new tile nothing happens. I must be missing a step somewhere that i can't figure out.

You'll need to add the necessary animations to the tile in order for the emitter to work. If you are simply transferring an emitter from one tile to another, a quick and dirty way to do that is to open the original tile in NWMax, delete all the geometry and lights from it, and export just the MDL base and emitter(s). Then using your text editor, open the donor tile .mdl file and copy everything from "#NWmax ANIM ASCII" to the "doneanim" line and add it at the end of your new tile, just before the "domemodel" line. Lastly, change all the instances of the donor tile's name to match your new tile's name in the .mdl file.

Once that's done, you can import your new tile back into NWMax and move the emitter(s) around, positioning them wherever you'd like them to be.

acidchalk

thanks guys, i will try all of this!