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particle system rendering

Started by axv4745 Apr 10, 2005 at 11:16 PM 2 replies 1.3k views

Original Post

Apr 10, 2005 at 11:16 PM

I've got a couple of particle systems (smoke, photon, explosion) that I'm trying to render but they don't seem to look that good (they don't look realistic and you can clearly tell that its coming from an image file). At first I thought it was just my images that weren't good enough but apparently I was told that if you set the right render states in direct X you can get some really cool and realistic looking particle systems (no matter what image you use as your base particle). Does anyone know what combination of renderstates could be used to achieve really cool and realistic looking particle systems of smoke, photons , and fire explosions?

Illco

Apr 11, 2005 at 5:01 AM

Use an image with some alpha (for example a disc with degrading intensity from the center to the outer border). Then enable alpha blending and experiment with the source and destination blend settings. Also experiment with the used vertex color, emission speed, bursts, direction, etc.

Greetz,

Illco

superpig

276

superpig

Apr 11, 2005 at 12:16 PM

Quote:
Original post by axv4745
At first I thought it was just my images that weren't good enough but apparently I was told that if you set the right render states in direct X you can get some really cool and realistic looking particle systems (no matter what image you use as your base particle). Does anyone know what combination of renderstates could be used to achieve really cool and realistic looking particle systems of smoke, photons , and fire explosions?

Set D3DRS_REALLYCOOLPARTICLESYSTEMS to true...

Seriously, D3D doesn't "make it cool" for you. You need to identify things that would make the effect look better, then tell D3D to do them.

Perhaps you should post a screenshot? We might be able to suggest some improvements for you...

jollyjeffers

245

jollyjeffers

Apr 11, 2005 at 1:16 PM

Quote:
Original post by superpig
Quote:
Original post by axv4745
At first I thought it was just my images that weren't good enough but apparently I was told that if you set the right render states in direct X you can get some really cool and realistic looking particle systems (no matter what image you use as your base particle). Does anyone know what combination of renderstates could be used to achieve really cool and realistic looking particle systems of smoke, photons , and fire explosions?
Set D3DRS_REALLYCOOLPARTICLESYSTEMS to true...

[lol] If only that existed...

Seriously though, it's been a while since I looked into PSprites (check out the SDK sample - its pretty good!), but I think the D3DRS_POINTSCALE[A|B|C] type states allowed D3D/hardware to scale the rendered sprite based on depth/distance (or whatever), thus giving a better illusion of movement etc...

EDIT:
D3DRS_POINTSIZE, D3DRS_POINTSIZE_MIN, D3DRS_POINTSPRITEENABLE, D3DRS_POINTSCALEENABLE, D3DRS_POINTSCALE_A, D3DRS_POINTSCALE_B, D3DRS_POINTSCALE_C are the ones I was thinking of. It's the _A, _B, _C values you want to look at - although the basic docs that I was looking at are a bit vague and look like they were copy-n-pasted [oh]

hth
Jack

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