[AddOn]RE:Group (Particle Clusters For Blender 2.7)

Hello Everyone,

I have another AddOn for you to check out. The RE:Group AddOn for Blender 2.68.

REMEMBER: You must enable Auto Execution of python scripts for this AddOn to work.

RE:Group manages a link between a group and a particle system. Part of the management tasks are to calculate the offset animation from the source group into the cluster Empty that deploys the final animated object. This allows group based animations to be delayed until a particle is born. Also the timing of the original animation may be time stretched to produce faster or slower copies from the original. All deployed by the standard particle system.

A short introduction tutorial that explains how to use RE:Group.

https://vimeo.com/71067961

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Hi Atom,

Always a amazing job! Your addon was my expectation!
Congrats “Il Maestro” Coder.
Spirou4D

very cool, as usual you have done an outstanding job :slight_smile:

Amazing work as always Atom, seems to me that most of the work you do with your addons should be standard in Blender. Or am I the only one that thinks that…

Impressive work! I’ve seen your other addons and scripts, and I think they’re incredibly useful and address some things that Blender is currently lacking. I fully agree with blendswap that your work should be included in Blender by default.
In that regard, have you considered having them included in trunk? Or, better yet, have you given any thought to sign up for next year’s GSoC? Blender’s roadmap indicates that there will be some rewriting of the particle system (mostly concerning making it node-based, if I remember correctly) and you certainly seem to have a good idea of what needs to be included in the system to make it a more complete and useful solution and you also seem to have the knowledge to get it in there.
I may be speaking out of my wrong end here, since I have no clue what that process involves or how much work that would require and how that could interfere with your life and work, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

Thanks for all your work!

A really great add on Atom… Could you use multiple animations in some way with this add on at the same time?

So if I set up 4 rocket animation all doing slightly different manuvers… could the add on work with something like this setup?

I have wanted this for a long time.

Thanks for the encouragement everyone.

@harleynut97: It can be done, but you need to create a separate REGroup object and emitter. Think of all three as companions (source animation, regroup controller, particle emitter). In this scene I have two emitters, two regroup objects and two different rocket animations. The rings are the emitter’s surface. I would not call it super speedy even with 18 particles per ring but update speed is directly related to the mesh density of the group it is deploying.

The attached BLEND file contains the dual group setup I just described.

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Im not getting objects with my empties . Even when I open the blend above with the dual regroup I see empties and I see you have 18 emissions for each emitter but I only see one ship for each plane. I get the object but it shows up as a object dot on the empty no mesh.

@kazinger
I did discover a bug if all the axis in the source object were not animated (i.e. RotX only and Size Z instead of all axis rotation and all axis z). I have updated the AddOn with my current experimental version. There are a couple more features in the panel that are WIP. The core is more stable. But feel free to pull down the latest 07272013 version of the AddOn and let me know if that fixes it for you?

Awesome addon. I played with it for a while, super useful thing.

What am I doing wrong? I tried different builds, different animations,

ak re group.blend (655 KB)

Register/ unregister is a litlle bugy. Try, to uncheck other addons, check only re:regrup, save preferences and then file -> open -> atom’s file. I had some problems at first too, since it didnt saw addon.

well i dunno now same for me here


@kazinger: I tried your file and it worked for me. Your cubes are off to the left so it was easy for me to miss them at first. You don’t seem to be doing anything wrong, however, your setup should work.

@rrtk: Thanks for finding the Unregister bug! I have fixed that and replaced the previous version with the new one. Currently 07282013 available in the first post.

@harleynut97: It can be done, but you need to create a separate REGroup object and emitter. Think of all three as companions (source animation, regroup controller, particle emitter). In this scene I have two emitters, two regroup objects and two different rocket animations. The rings are the emitter’s surface. I would not call it super speedy even with 18 particles per ring but update speed is directly related to the mesh density of the group it is deploying.

Thanks for replying back atom, It’s nice to know it is possible… I’m going to study your example file you posted

I was making flowers open across a field. One color on the inside and one color on the outside so the color of the field changes. I always thought that in particles there was a vertex group for the life start of a particle. I was wrong.

Amazing!
Very wanted feature. This is a feature to be inside the particle settings…
There’s already a lot of options for group instancing in particles settings, this one could be there as a single button: Animation to Birth

Thank you, Atom!
I like your scripts a lot. They are helpful!

Hi Atom, Is there anyway to get this to play well with an emitters face normals? So That if I have an emitter with multiple faces, that each face a unique direction, then theInsances will face that direction also. I’ve played around with it for some time, and unable to figure it out. Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

@unitedfilmdom: I see what to mean. It would be a nice feature to orient the deployed group to the surface normal. Basically I would need to add a checkbox to the panel called “Orient To Normals”. If the checkbox is True then grab the face normal and use it in a Matrix math calculation to rotate the Empty-Per-Particle. It should not be that hard I just don’t have time to look up the math right now. Does anyone have a link to some orient to surface code?

It is tooooo slooooow if I animate about 128 simple anumated objects =(
Thank you.