I think I may be running to some limitations here, but I’m not sure so I thought I would ask.
I’m trying to animate color and transparency over each billboard particles’ lifetime. I can do it fine with normal particles using the strand/particle coordinate system, but billboards don’t seem to respect this value. Neither do object instances. Is there any way to do this?
Additionally, I tried to use object instancing of a flat plane instead of using a billboard, but if I do it that way I can’t figure out how to force each object instance to face the camera, killing the effect. Besides, it doesn’t look like you can animate transparency or color over each instances’ lifespan anyway, so that doesn’t help.
Also, it doesn’t look like i can set up any kind of per-particle rotation parameters on billboards either. They will only spawn in their initial upright orientation and I can’t modify that in any way, other than a blanket rotation setting for all billboards.
So these really are all limitations of the software? I suppose none of this will be implemented any time soon either, since it looks like all future particle work is going node-based. Which is awesome overall, but I guess that means that particles will be severely limited in their usefulness for another few years until the node system reaches maturity.
Dang.
Jahka is the one responsible for the particle system right? Or are there other developers contributing to it? I’m not upset or anything, I’m just wondering if the particle system is likely to see any new development any time soon, and if so, maybe I can discuss these features with them.
Ya it appears lot of feature in 2.6 is under development. The buttons exists but it does nothing! This is crazy you know. Blender manual is not the greatest source of information but, if for example Billboard function is not fully operational, that information should be there. “This function non operational.” That’s all you need. So the users don’t go messing around with that feature for 6 hours only to learn that it’s not working! Can someone add this line in Blender manual? Let us know what is working and what is under development.