[Brian Jones]

With regular particles you can set negative number for Start Emission but it won’t do anything unless the negative frames actually exist in your Timeline. TP generators don’t allow you to set start times in the interface at all, they are pure keyframed so once again the negative timeline must exist to allow you to lay a keyframe at your desired start point.

[Brian Jones]

controlling the cloth one is all about the stiffness of the cloth, the air resistance, the mass, the gravity, etc. etc. etc. Global drag was real touchy just using mostly defaults with no gravity with that speed along that spline. It’s all going to depend on the setup you have, play with the settings a lot.

[Brian Jones]

you can always toss a HyperNurb inside another HyperNurb but why? If you want more subdivision you can do the same thing by increasing the subdivisions in the first HN (not saying there is absolutely no reason to put one HN in another but it would be unusual). If you are not familiar with HyperNurbs you should check out HyperNurbs in the Help, particularly Weighting the Hypernurbs cage. Your squirt gun looks like it could use that (or well placed bevels).

[Brian Jones]

Look for Mix Textures in the Help under Texture Tag: Tag Properties… But Danel is not a standard material and I don’t think it adds like normal.

Your duplicate object with Transparency should work but the duplicate should be just a little bigger than the original object.

[Brian Jones]

Some possibilities, rough but maybe useful.

ribbons.zip

[Brian Jones]

I forgot Glow has a Random parameter you could use that as well but I don’t know if it does the right thing (I have no clue what the Las Vegas star does). If it’s not right here is an example of a noise plugged into the Radius parameter of Glow. The type of noise and it’s settings as well as the parameter it’s plugged into (it can be plugged into any parameter the XPresso node sees) are going to make the result different. Hopefully you’ll find something right in there.

[Brian Jones]

feed a noise into the glow brightness with XPresso

[Brian Jones]

speed of render is only partly tied to memory usage. Polys take memory, image textures take memory but the killers time-wise in rendering are the calculations of light, shadow, texture and preparation for light and shadow and texture – simple example – Icosahedron sphere/editable/Matrix Extrude tool(defaults)/drop into a HyperNurb – rendertime 0 (less than a second) – add a glass texture – rendertime somewhere in the 30-60 second range likely. No more polys in the scene, no more memory usage but lots more calculation time. Add shadows, add GI, add Caustics……

Check out this page (particularly the bits about memory at the bottom) good general info.

https://www.bonkers.de/cinema/cinema.html

[Brian Jones]

a couple possibilities (might be more)

– create the text (an extrude), use the Wrap deformer to wrap the text around a sphere and use a boolean to cut the text from the sphere

– use displacement (sub-poly displacement probably) in a material to “cut” the sphere, the displacement map of the text would have to be big enough so it is clean enough (not chunky at the edges)

[Brian Jones]

usually done with Fresnel in the Transparency or Alpha channel if I’m thinking the same thing as you.