In addition to the Standard Operators shown above, there is a drop down menu within the Operators panel that gives you access to the seven different types of controls to build your particle animation with.
Each of these different groups of Operators is used for specific reasons and described briefly below.
Standard - The Standard group of Operators within thinkingParticles gives you the most basic building blocks for construction of your particle systems. Everything from Size and Velocity of particles, to the direction they face and what they follow can be found within this primary grouping of tools. Be aware that you also have MAXScript access from within this section as well as the ability to create unique operators that are based on the animatable parameters of ANY 3ds Max object.
Dynamics - The Dynamics Operators are responsible for all of the collision detection. inter-particle interaction and physics simulations within thinkingParticles. The rigid body dynamics engine that the new version of thinkingParticles now sports is exceptionally powerful and production proven on major films like 2012. All of the Motion Inheritance that can be used to create physically based vortices from fans and propellers, shape-based crashing, and bouncing of particles can be found within this group.
Generator - thinkingParticles offers many ways to generate particles in your 3D environments and the Generator Operators are responsible for creating particles within the system. There are four basic particle generators implemented. Two particle generators creates particles based on any position you supply. Another operator lets you draw particles in 3D space. Finally, the most complex one is a conditional version of our popular MatterWaves product, which gives you ultimate control over your particles. All particle generators share some of the same basic features and functionality.
Shape - thinkingParticles handles particle shapes (the look of a particle) in exactly the same way as 3ds Max does. Particles are usually one dimensional points in space and they do not offer anything more than X, Y and Z coordinates. However, Shape operators create and place any predefined parametric mesh object or instanced geometry at the position of each particle. They can even create metaball style liquid shapes for your particle animations.
Fragmenter - thinkingParticles is renowned for its rigid body dynamics and demolition effects, it was one reason why it was chosen for the Roland Emmerich movie "2012" as the F/X tool.
Material - thinkingParticles provides you with a unique ability to paint with your particles, and the Material Operator is what you want to use to achieve this effect. Each impact of a particle on an object’s surface will create a color “splash” or any other material effect you can think up. This can be used to create impressive bullet impacts, footsteps, rain drops, etc.
Initiator - Initiators are new to thinkingParticles and are designed to give users a new way of processing rules and operators within DynamicSets. The main idea behind an initiator is control. An Initiator is different from other operators in that connected conditions or operators are evaluated ONLY as soon as the initiator is processed. This type of behavior offers much more control of the rule processing than with any other type of operator.
Export - The Export Operators are designed to be used to turn particles into standard 3ds Max objects. You can turn both deforming meshes and non-deforming particles into normal objects using these operators, so that the output of these new objects can be used within other dynamics simulation systems like reactor - or exported to other platforms.
Tools - those Nodes are designed to act as a one time tool that might also work independently from a complex wire network.
Reference - this type of Nodes are used to handle particle references. This powerful new system, allows to actually connect any number of particles with each other and influence them based on their referenced values.
Volume Breaker - volumeBreaker™ is available as a standalone product and offers one of a kind performance and features. The thinkingParticles integrated sibling of volumeBreaker" offers more power through its 100% rule based and fully procedural approach to demolition F/X. thinkingParticles integrated volumeBreaker operator is like a standard volumeBreaker on steroids!
