How to freeze particle animation?

[skinnytorus]

Dear all,
I absolutely love real time CG stuff, but inability to stop particles from running when the Timeline is stopped
came as a real surprise. I find it a VERY distracting factor at scene editing stage.

Is there a way to make particles freeze when the Timeline is stopped? If not, let's ask our kind developers to implement such option in future releases.

Thank you.

[francis]

Well, what exists is a Simulation Speed parameter that enables you to fasten / slow down or even fully pause the simulation but unfortunately we have no waysyet to make simulation position controlled by a Timeline.
What's missing is something to fully precompute the particles animation for a given length and then to have a transport parameter enabling to control position from a timeline.
It's in our mind since a while, but as you guessed most Smode users do live performance with it, so that's not a matter for them.

Call to all users: if you think Smode should have this feature, please let it know by liking/commenting this topic!

[skinnytorus]

I see... For it to work you'll have to invent a particle caching system from scratch, right? That's quite a task...
But on the other hand, particle caching is known to greatly increase scene performance. Increasing performance has always been among the main goals of a real-time cg developer, hasn't it? I think all will benefit from this feature if not now, than in the future.

[francis]

Yep, we indeed need to introduce this concept of particles cache. In the same spirit we could precompute heavy fluid-style simulations, etc... By the way that would enable reverse playing particle systems which also sounds promisefull

I will report here if some progress is made, but unless many users ask for it, it may take a while...

[skinnytorus]

OK. Lets see what people say.