Hi, its been a long while since i;ve posted in this section, hopefully someone will have experience and can help me with this

So, to be simple here is what I want to do. I want to render simple particles on an object in 3ds, and save it as a NIF. I've already added animation to Oblivion before, particles should be no different, my one problem is, i've never worked with particles before.

I have a simple object and it has some particles dispersing off of it, its 100 frames. What my problem is, when I scroll though the frames, the particles dont show (the marks do so I can see where they are going), only when I render do they show and it is _reallly_ slow. Is this normal?

Whats the best way to save so I can preview on a saved file (pref a nif) what I can see in the rendering window?

If Its impossible to save particles to a .nif, could save the animation as an image that supports animation (ie gif/png)? As a gif its possible to take the individual frames and insert them into the nif that way to play it.

I figured out some, I can get them into a series of images which is half of what I want, if i can get it to play in the nif that would be ideal, but from the looks of it it might be impossible

you need max6-8 and the civ4 plugin to export particles to nif. < there is no other way cept to find vanilla psystems and hijack them. you can get away with a hell of a lot here. unless you need spacewarps and forces

yep, afaik there is no viewport rendering for particles, at least not on max8. certainly would be handy for easy previs. :shrug:

actually afaik, there is no real good way to preview for oblivion besides taking it into game....nifskope won't. in fallout3 there is a geck viewer that you can open nifs in and will play psystems. however.... the thing doesn't display the same thing anyway... so I still would have to properly preview in game. = time consuming madness!

the animation types you describe would be flip controllers or texture transforms. either could be used to play an texture anim sequence on a mesh. they work differently. the flipping texture just plays a sequence of textures on a mesh. which would be easiest in this case. the texture transform moves a single texture around in the U or V directions. I would try to use the latter as the flips have basically been removed from the the engine since F3. so you might as well get used to those imo. what you would have to do is make a big texture, lining up all the components of you texture sequence, but having them on 1 texture map. then key that material properly... which is a little bit of a mind bender, but you should probably be able to quickly see how that part of the material editor works.

anyway google saiden storms animation tutorials. it thoroughly describes how to export and set up for oblivion particles, flipping textures, and texture transforms.

psystems are different in structure than anims. imo far more complex. especially when niftools exporter won't have anything to do with them.

Thanks Ghogiel, that actually answers about all my questions! I have max 2010, so I guess i'd have to install 8 again to use the civ4 plugin, which I thought obsolete because of the niftools one, apparently not!

Looks like some pretty cool stuff will be possible after all. I think I can get it workin, i'll have to play with it some tomorrow, i'll post back if i have any other problems thanks again!

I'm actually surprised max 2010 doesn't have a good prerendering solution for viewing psystem output. the whole viewport rendering is miles ahead, and surely there a solution, like having a little mini render window pop up that is specifically designed for psystem previewing.. idk. whatever. Usually when I think of things like that, it's already in the tool kit somewhere...

so you are gonna have animated textures on the paricles?

Animated textures on the particles? lol that sounds .. pretty crazy. Nah I was going to have particles coming off an animated texture or just an animated object, by the time I get it working, i'll think of something to do with it. lol I dont know yet, I figured I;d do it cause I didnt know how. By the time I make something i bet TES:V will be out :laugh:

I bet it would be a huge performance hit, but this could be used to emulate wind, dust, leaves, snow. It could be on a loop around in front of the player, and play depending on time of day or weather. Cause when wind blows it kicks up all sorts of stuff on the ground. Not to mention, spell effects might be possible, though im not very familiar with the CS.

Only things I found to preview are the render window and a video preview, its not bad, just not real time with your workspace or as convenient as it would be in the viewport.

that is basically how dust clouds sandstorms, floating dust in a room, bubbles from the sea bed, rain etc are. just particle systems dotted around. I think rain and similar vanilla weather systems work pretty much exactly like you describe, they follow the player and have a certain radius around the pc. just in front wouldn't work in 3rd person...