Particle Animation with Anim8or v0.7
What is Particle Animation?
Effects like atmospherics (rain, snowing, mist, smoke, etc.), fire, flowing liquids and so on, are very hard (if not impossible) to animate realistically with usual mesh modeling and animation. This is where particles have the main role.
While usual key frame animation requires an active participation of the artist, particle animation is procedural, i.e. the computer makes the whole animation based on a set of user defined mathematical relations. Don't panic, you can do Particle Animation without knowing math! In that case you won't be so creative and all you will have to do is to use (or modify according to your needs) existing templates, created by others.
Now, what is Particle Animation in fact? It is a method to animate a large number of objects (particles), governed by predefined rules. These particles, for example, can make the appearance of mist, gas jet, or a deformable solid shape. The computer places the particles into their position, animates or hides them according to a screenplay defined by the user.
Depending on the desired effect, the particles could be very simple objects, like polygons with a few faces, spheres, or complex meshes (even hierarchies). Rain can be simulated with a large number of detached faces, thus reducing the poly count, while an animated forest can be done using a tree as “particle”.
Particle Animation with Anim8or v 0.7
Anim8or v 0.7 doesn’t have support for Particle Animation (PA), so we have to add it through the “back door”. We are going to edit the .an8 project file inserting the code for P.A. This won’t be difficult, since .an8 files are plain text files (thanks Steve!). Before we could proceed to animate with particles, we have to “hack” the .an8 file format (and again, Steve gave his blessing for that). Once understood the file format for animation, we shell be able to write the proper code directly in the project file for animating thousands of particles as we wish. I anticipate saying that our particles will appear in the scene as eobjects, multiple instances (clones) of a certain object (usually object01).