Particles BlobMesh renderer [WIP]

Hello everybody.

I'm currently working on making a particles renderer that behaves like the so called "Blob Mesh" in 3dsMax.
If I'm fine with the result, I target to release it on the asset store.

Here's a quick video capture of how it looks like for now :

I'ts in an early stage, with basic editing and almost no optimization. Sorry for the small framerate, my computer is getting old and hardly handles fullscreen video capture ^^.

 

..waiting for webplayer demo.. : )

 

@mgear : Here it is ! But watch out, It's not really optimized for now. Link

 

Hey, new version !
I managed to get this to render by chunks, so we have gained some performances.
I added a "Multi-Thread" button, that switch On and Off the chunks calculations as a Coroutine (Not sure if this is multithreaded, somebody can help ?), but it doesn't seams to change really yo much.

So in this version, there is a big render zone, when before there was 3 (the seams were hidden by boxes ...).

Click on the image to try !



I haven't managed to get the particles to softly "slip" on the box colliders, they're bouncing instead. Does anyone have an idea on how I can achieve this ?

 

If you reach the level of Portal 2 I'll buy it.

 

Coroutine != multi-thread.

Nice work though.

 

You migth get nicer physics using instanced rigidbody spheres,
then you can adjust physics material for friction/bounciness.
(and you could pull/push the water around easier)

 

@megmaltese : You're talking about something like this :



Again, click the image to test the webplayer.

 

Very very nice...

6R

 

Well it's not the splash, but the fact that the mesh someway "vibrates", I think it's due to the low resolution of it.
But if you will be able to reach a higher resolution with good framerate I may be really interested

 

Nice work, this could be really fun for a few things.

 

Well, now it gets tricky ... I works quite well but to slow ... I need to find a way to speed this up.
Any idea ? If I convert my scripts from JS to C# will the performances be increased ? Any way to do real multi-threading ?

Help

 

Changing languages won't change your performance one way or the other. You can do multi-threading just like you would any other C# application. The only caveat to that is Unity is not thread safe so you can't interact with the engine outside of the main thread. Now, that being said, there is no reason you can't offload calculations to a separate thread and marshal the result back into the main thread for the engine to use.

 

Ok, so, new update !

I managed to improve a bit the performances by re-thinking the way the renderer works. Also, the "vibration" thing is less visible.
Next step is to work on the merging of the particles to be more smooth. And always, optimise .

You can try this webplayer, it's quite the same but you can test how the precision factor affects the aspect and speed of the renderer.

 

very cool

 

may u add an fps counter...?

anyways this is great and may be fun for fluids

 

Any update on the progress of your Blob Mesh / metaballs project?

 

Theres no way this could work on an iphone right?

 

@Dan Dixon: Sorry, I'm working on some other personal projects right now, but this one is always on my to-do list. I'm trying to optimize my scripts to gain some performance and also trying to avoid the "vibration" effect. I've got some ideas to achieve this, I just need to take the time to test it.

@macdude2: Well, I don't have a android or iphone license, so I can't be sure. All the calculation is done on the cpu, the platform should no have influence on this. But I think that it would probably be laggy on mobile ^^.

 

@macdude2: Well, I don't have a android or iphone license, so I can't be sure. All the calculation is done on the cpu, the platform should no have influence on this. But I think that it would probably be laggy on mobile ^^.[/QUOTE]

would it? what if u use a unlit material on it so you can make the mesh less smooth?

 

@macdude2: Well, I don't have a android or iphone license, so I can't be sure. All the calculation is done on the cpu, the platform should no have influence on this. But I think that it would probably be laggy on mobile ^^.[/QUOTE]

would it? what if u use a unlit material on it so you can make the mesh less smooth?

 

@stefmen: The rendering isn't the big issue now. My first goal is to make it work smoothly on pc. But by making the the mesh less smooth it would have a blocky aspect...

 

Hi. How do you generate metaballs geometry? Are you using marching cubes method from unifycommunity?

 

Any news about this? Because it look amazingly awesome...

 

It's been 5 years, so I guess not. Locking this.