can someone look at this clipl and explain to me how they did the waterfall? Not the modeling of the rocks or anything, just the particle system waterfall. I know it says “Halo particles with transparency” but that is over my head.
Thanks!
They used Blender Internal renderer for the particles. At first I thought they must have set the render option under the particle system to “halo”, but you don´t have a lot of settings there, so what you get are these huge smudges of light. What you want to do instead is to create an object made up of a single vertex (like, create a plane, tab into edit mode, delete three of the four vertices, tab out and do “shift+alt+ctrl+c” and click “origin to geometry”, that way your vertex object has its origin where the vertex actually IS); then, go to the particle system and under “render” choose “object” and select your new vertex object; that object now needs a halo material, select it, add a new material (remember, this is Blender Internal, not cycles), and make it a halo material. turn down the halo size there to something like 0.050 (you´ll have to tweak a lot here eventually, as in the settings for the particle system itself). Let the animation run for a while (alt+a), until particles appear, pause, hit render. You´ll get tiny dots, hopefully. You want streaks, though. Quickest way: under the scene´s render options (little camera icon) activate “sampled motion blur”, turn the number to something like 5 for a starter (attention: factor 5 for your render times!), and while you´re here, go to the shading option and activate “alpha: transparent”, plus under “output” a little further down select a file format that actually supports alpha channels such as Tifs or PNGs with “RGBA” selected. Hit render again, remember: it´s gonna take five times as long because of the sampled motion blur, wait, and see. Voilà: streaky halo particles with transparency. Hopefully…
Possibly a better way to do the motion blur would be to activate the “vector” option under Layers (INSTEAD of the sampled motion blur!) and use that in the compositor to create a vector motion blur, there´s tutorials for that kind of thing…
BTW: cool idea to make a waterfall, combining projection mapping and a particle system, thanks for the hint! ;o) The tricky bit will always be the edge where flowing, transparent, reflective water tears off and becomes foam…
Paulion, that did the trick! Thank you for the detailed response.