BSA703 28/3

Progress! Turns out the graph editor isnt too tricky if you arent trying to insert it mid scene build. My problem earlier was trying to merge the easy tutorial way of creating water with the graph and thats why it wasnt working. I merged info from 2 tutorials to figure out what I know so far:

This gave me a basic intro but I found some of it still kind of confusing so jumped to:

The second one helped a lot more but both of them are still a little behind in terms of adding materials so I have had to use a little logical jumping to figure it out

What Ive learned so far:

Use middle mouse button to drag the maya object into the editor and create the Input node. Hit tab to bring up the node list and in this case I used the basic_particles_graph.

Right clicking on the node gives you the Explode option to expand the node.

This is where all the particle settings and manipulators get connected. Drag the other scene objects into the graph editor and connect them to the collider node to make the particles collide with them.

Caching - as simple as creating a cache node in the editor and switching between write and read mode. One issue I ran into was when choosing the name of the cache files, make sure to use the naming convention filename.###.bob(default bifrost file extension) otherwise it will only cache the final frame. this defaults to the windows home directory also so change it to the project directory cache file.

Place an assign material node in the final spot before output. Connect a surface mat and name it the same way the other aistandardsurface materials are named, and adjust the values. I used hypershade to get the material looking the way I wanted then copied over the settings. It was after doing this that I discovered you can right click the material node in the hypershade window and copy to viewport selection.

Current playblast:

It actually overflows a lot nicer than the other sim however these particles dont have a mesh yet and that might affect how they flow. Once I can get the shaders and mesh sorted, I will worry about the direction of flow and that initial rush over the end(100% could just be the shape of the CC tub that I am using)

Trying to mesh the particles following this tutorial:

First step is placing a point_to_level_set node after the simulation, the particles will change to a dark grey colour if this is working. Next is a volume_to_mesh node after the level set.

Now you can link in the assigned_material node after the volume node to apply a shader to the particles. 

Like with ToonBoom nodes, you can select multiple nodes, right click and add a backdrop which gives you the shaded box to drag groups of nodes at one time, this is my attempt at a tidy graph with everything minimized while not in use. All the options are shown on the right under parameters so they dont need to be expanded really anyway.

I need to figure out why the particles/mesh are only showing up in the playblast and not the final render. Hoping its something simple.