Rendering 3ds Max Legacy Particles

Introduction

  • The “3ds Max Legacy Particles” (Legacy Particles for shot) are the original particle systems available in 3ds Max from release 1 to release 5 before the introduction of Particle Flow.

Overview

  • The Legacy Particles included the following systems:
    • Snow
    • Spray
    • Super Spray
    • PArray
    • PCloud
  • The Legacy Particles use hard-coded parameters and behaviors and cannot be expanded beyond these capabilities.
  • The Legacy Particle systems are generally limited to 65,000 particles per system and are thus only of limited use for Krakatoa rendering.
  • Since the systems provide a random seed though, multiple partitions of 65K particles could be generated to produce millions.

Particle Data Channels

  • The Legacy Particles provide only a few basic data channels.
  • These include:
    • Position - mapped directly to the Krakatoa Position channel.
    • Velocity - mapped directly to the Krakatoa Velocity channel.
    • Age - not used directly by Krakatoa, but accessible in MagmaFlow as an Integer channel containing the Age in Ticks.
    • Lifespan - not used directly by Krakatoa, but accessible in MagmaFlow as an Integer channel containing the LifeSpan in Ticks.
  • Since no other channels are accessible, these particles do not support Normals and cannot be used directly with Phong Surface and Environment Reflection modes in Krakatoa.

Particle Color Sources

  • If no material is assigned and no other overrides are applied by Krakatoa, the Legacy Particles will render by default using the Object (Wireframe) Color of the Particle System.
  • If a Standard Material is assigned to the system, the Diffuse Color of the material will be used instead.
  • If the Standard Material uses texture maps to define the Diffuse color, the map will be used (provided it uses Object space coordinates).
  • If a Global Channels Override is enabled in the Krakatoa Global Render Values rollout, the override color will be used.