In many basic ways, rendering particle and fluid simulations is similar to rendering any other object in Softimage. You can use all standard lighting techniques (including global illumination and final gathering), set shadows, and apply motion blur.
The particle shaders described in this section are not supported for the Explosion simulator so they will not render any results. You can use only the Explosion shader with this simulator. See Rendering Explosions for more information.
Unlike any other object in Softimage, however, there are special particle shaders designed specifically for particle-based simulations that let you make particles look the way you want. As well, you can apply shaders to individual particles types to create specific effects or apply shaders to a whole particle cloud to have all its particle types be rendered in the same way.
Rendering particles is much like rendering other objects in Softimage when it comes to general things like lighting, shadows, and motion blur.
You can have multiple particle clouds in a scene and they can all render happily, even if the clouds’ volumes intersect one another.
For general information about rendering, see these sections:
• To set up render passes, see Passes & Partitions [ Rendering ].
• To render the final scene, see Rendering.
You can use motion blur on particles in the same way that it is used on any other type of object in Softimage. Motion blur calculates the speed of the particles using the camera shutter speed. The camera motion is mapped as particle motion relative to the camera, so blur vectors are computed in any condition of absolute and relative motion.
To render motion blur on particles, make sure that the whole particle simulation is cached because Softimage stores motion from the last frame to compute the motion blur. See Playing Particle-based Simulations for information about caching particles.
If you want to have motion blur only on the particles but not on other objects in the scene, create a group with all the objects on which you don’t want motion blur, apply the motion blur property to the group, and deselect Blur for it.
For more information, see Motion Blur [ Lights and Cameras ].
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5