Emit a chunky particle from a weapon and keep it positioned with the weapon! Is this possible?

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I want to be able to emit a particle from a weapon or body part, but that particle needs to be a model, so a chunky particle. The particle must be aligned with the part that spawned it, and continue to stay aligned, in every dimension.

 

What combination of codes in the emitter properties would I use. And is this even possible. I have exhausted myself for about 3 hours now trying to get this to work. It is the only way I can see on character models to combine all the envmapped and non-envmapped parts that I want on a held or worn item.

 

I want this so bad!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

One of the main failings of using txi on weapon parts is that you cannot use the txi command "blending additive" it does nothing. I don't know how to turn off what is blocking it. You CAN use txi on weapon parts, but not all commands are recognized. For example, I can animate weapon part textures all I want, and in any way I want. But I cannot change the blending mode.

 

I've tried overwriting the envmap on the texture, and it seems to not take. I've used all black, all white, etc.

 

I've tried turning off all three part envmap 1's in the baseitems 2da, and none of them actually remove the envmap. I've tried setting them to **** or 0. Nothing changes.

 

I've tried emitting a particle, and everything about that particle works exactly how I want it, via txi and on-model alpha, but I can't get it to stay in position. It always points north, and it never rotates with the parent model or emitter.

 

Ive tried animating the particle, but it assumes north when loaded, not the facing of the character, so it does not follow the animated path of the character correctly.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

I couldn't get a chunk to align itself to the body part that spawned it, either.  However, I believe I was able to get a regular emitter to at least follow those movements and here is a vague (but hopefully-complete) account of the settings that allowed it.  Even if those setting do work, it's still not a chunk. 

 

However, there may be a possibility that if you study the methods used in Gaoneng's Emitter-Based shields, you may be able to reasonably fake it.  From its vault entry:

Though emitter-based, these shields are not flat. They have calculated curved surfaces like real shields and carefully layered effects to simulate depth and thickness, so they do look rather good in-game.

 

Unfortunately, I can't rattle off what he did off the top of my head.  The effect was superb, though.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

So what I am finding is that if I was to cut my object into individual faces, and then represent each face precisely with an emitted image, then I can do what I want. That is actually spectacular to think about for low poly objects. Unfortunately, my object is very high poly, so doing so would not be completely worth my time. Not impossible, as each face could simply be put into a sprite sheet, and emitted with individual single fire emitters pointing to that exact index into the sprite sheet. And then the only drawback would be the total lack of smoothing between faces, but in this case, I didn't need any smoothing, since I was using entirely blending additive (or as an emitter, using the blending mode lighten).

 

So what I might do is come up with a maxscript to bust faces off an object, position them into a rows and cols, all facing upward, so I can take a screen shot from top down. That screenshot could be easily turned into the needed sprite sheet.

 

Now the other drawback I am thinking of is that animation of the faces would be difficult, but again, not impossible. In the event that I needed animated texture on the faces, rows could be used for the face index, and cols could be used for the frame to play, leaving blank spaces off to the right, if needed. The only problem with that is I don't know how to animate the texture in a way that I can still image individual faces and cut them into a sprite sheet.

 

So ultimately, I don't think I will be pursuing this at all, since what I wanted is so very very near impossible, it might easily be considered as such, at least for now.

 

 

 

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All I really want is blending additive for TXI functions in character weapons. That's all! Why can't I have that?