Particle Updates (Patreon)

Hey all!

I'd love to say that I'm done with particles, but they've proven to be a bit more finicky than I'd like. I ended up having to rewrite parts of my particle system implementation (as well as the implementation for animated textures) to properly support Source Engine particles, and I still haven't quite nailed it yet, but I'm getting there. Here are some comparisons between Pragma and Source:

https://imgur.com/a/dm1uNF2 

It's very close for some, not so much for others.

I still need a few more days for some fine-tuning and there's still the issue of how to render the particles with Cycles. Due to the way how particles work in Source/Pragma, they're not compatible with the Cycles particle system, which means I have to render them as regular meshes instead, but so far the results don't look particularly satisfying. I may have to end up rendering the particles with Pragma, and then superimposing them on the Cycles image, but that's something I'll have to experiment with.

I'd prefer a solution with the Cycles renderer though, so if anyone knows of a good way for rendering additive objects with Cycles, please let me know! I'm not an artist and my experience with Cycles nodes is limited.

Anyway, the good news is, progress should pick up speed again once I'm done with the particle implementation. Unless I'm forgetting something, this is the last major SFM feature that was still missing, everything else that's remaining is small fries by comparison. :)

Some of the other changes include:

• Added support for morph target normals. (Slightly improves rendering quality for facial animations)

• Fixed various issues related to wrinkle/stretch maps and added support for them when rendering with Cycles. (Also improves facial quality)

• Added support for importing morph targets from glTF files. Default flex controllers are automatically generated. (I.e. you don't have to deal with defining flexes or flex controllers if you don't want to)

• Added support for Source Engine animated textures (https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Animated_Particles)

• Added the option to specify different PBR material properties for meshes that share the same material. This solves issues like on the soldier model, where the jacket and helmet would share the same material and therefore would have to share PBR properties as well (this is no longer the case):

Thank you! :)