I can create explosions in blender, that have the mushroom cloud look I need. But it is not poosible, as near as I can tell to export them to something usable by Scenekit
So I'm trying to create a similar thing in Scenekit, but the Scenekit particle system is woefully feature poor. I'm wondering if anyone knows of any tutorial showing how to create realisitic explosions with scenekit? Or if it's even possible at all. I cannot even get something that looks "good enough" much less realistic.
You're right, Scene Kit can only read the animations stored in a Collada file as SCNAnimations. Particles and SCNActions can not therefore be described in the Collada file.
Could you tell us which feature of the Particle System you're missing ? Particles may only be sprites, not 3D objects, but that's pretty common in realtime 3D engines.
Well I am trying to create realistic explosions.
This tutorial shows the type of look I'm going for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtSbZtPO_2w
I know it can't quite be this good... But I need something that resembles an actual explosion.
Using scene kit I cannot even manage to get something that resembles a firy blast, much less something like this.
I took a very quick look at the video.
The first thing to note is that it uses several particle systems:
- one for the mushroom shape
- one for the smoke
- one for the debris
- one for the shock wave
The hardest one is the mushroom shape. In Blender, create maybe 5 geometries for its different states, then use a SCNMorpher to change the shape along time. Set up the Particle System so it uses it as its .emitterShape.
What you're trying to achieve is not easy. I don't even find the example in the video is that realistic. But I do believe this is achievable with Scene Kit's particle systems.
This is not even remotely possible in SceneKit for two reasons:
1. This example is using 100's of thousands of particles to get the lovely billowing effects around turbelence - Scene Kit simply can't handle that on anything other than a fully kitted Mac Pro. Maybe not even then.
2. There's a lot of stuff missing, as you've noted, from the particles in SceneKit that you might be accustomed to in 3D apps' particle systems.
HOWEVER...
You can export this sort of thing as a frame by frame animation (like a little movie clip) and use that... if that works for you, and you're not needing the effect to be close to the camera nor truly 3D, and then play it back on a placard.
Probably not the answer you're looking for.
Generally speaking real-time particle systems are an order of magnitude less capable than rendered particle systems. The only exception to this is the Unreal Engine particles, which are somewhat better than most real-time engines because they chose to put an emphasis on particles for this and the next generation of consoles and GPU cards.
But this is of little to no help if you're focusing on iOS as the devices generally don't have nearly the kinds of GPU power needed to exploit what Unreal Engine can do with particles.
-----------------
There are no good particle system tutorials for SceneKit, nor SpriteKit.
