effects animation

Big news – it’s now clear that just one or two DVDs will not be enough for everything I want to show you, so there’s now gonna be three DVDs full of TP glory!

You should think of them as a Beginner (the one already released), Intermediate (the second one coming up) and Advanced (the last one). As the process is going, I realized that I’d need that space to realize my full plan, and instead of cutting back and making a half-hearted effort, we added a third DVD, which you should really enjoy.

And now to the other piece of news – what’s gonna be in these DVDs, exactly? The plan for the 2nd DVD is the following:

• Raycasting – the intersect node. Example with projecting particles on the ground, hovercraft effect
  
• Referencing. Orbit node ease-in, valley airstrike examples
  
• Motion inheritance. The motion inheritance node – example with car and leaves
  
• Intermediate generation and positioning – Particle draw, Matterwaves, Spline, surface and volume positioning, by particle shape
  
• Particles driving scene objects. Object to particle node
  
• Shape collision, sampling, mass
  
• Pre-broken fragmentation – fragment, blurp
  
• Procedural fragmentation 1 – Volumebreaker
  
• Procedural fragmentation 2 – Volumecell and VolumeActivate
  
• Caching. Cache layers and cache elements, shape on birth, DS as an FX wrapper
  
• Joints – Basic SC joints, use of joint counter and joint data to manipulate them
  
• Joint structures. Procedural jointing system for creating and destroying a jointed structure
  
• PhysX dynamics
  
• Particle-based soft bodies. Vertex to particle, SC deformation
  
• Intermediate object interaction. Collision map, displacement, deform modifier, deform map
  
• Cycles, time and iteration based. Iterator and counter nodes. Examples for iterator cycle and condition cycle through groups
  
• Intermediate non-linear animation. Timer1, time loop, geo instance nla options
  
• Intermediate particle interaction. Pattach, psearch, pselection nodes
  
• Custom data streams. Data channels and memory node. Example with setting global controls
  
• TP to FumeFX
  
• FumeFX to TP
  
• Switching. One to x and x to one nodes. Example with alternate controls
  
• TD tool. Example with a rocket launcher.
  
• Intermediate demo project. Death ray house destruction shot!

Of course, I reserve the right to change that around a bit, but overall that should be it. Plans for the 3rd DVD – the advanced one – will be posted after DVD2 release.

Enjoy and comment! And if there’s anything specific you need to be touched in the DVDs, and I haven’t thought about it – feel free to request 🙂