A very WIP flowmap creator/editor for Blender. (up to v.2.79 - needs to be updated for 2.8)
Initial testing release - more features and instructions coming soon.
Installation:
- extract to your Blender addons directory
Basic Usage:
The UI panel is in the Particle Simulation tab.
-
Duplicate the mesh you want to create a flowmap for (or a basic plane for tiling water textures)
- Note: the mesh needs UVs to be able to bake the flowmap to texture
-
Subdivide the copy a few times for more particles in the flow simulation
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Click Create Data in the UI panel with the new mesh selected. This creates the particle system.
-
Add any force fields you want to influence the flow simulation
- ex. any places that the flow will be diverted at, low-range wind forces at the edges to simulate a shore, etc
-
select the frame of the simulation you want to get velocities from
-
To calculate the velocities for the flowmap:
- Click Calc Direction to use the amount by which each particle moved between frame 0 and the current frame
- (or) Calc Forces to use each particle's actual velocity in this frame
- (Calc Geometry does nothing for now)
- This will create a new vertex color layer called "flow"
-
Use Blender's Bake feature to bake the vertex colors to a texture
-
Save the image from UV view.
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The resulting flowmap is packed in the same way a normal map would be, so the values will have to be converted in the engine you're using.
- UDK and Unreal Engine 4 - using Unpack Min setting if -1.0 (rgb) works.
Changelog:
v0.0.1 Current:
- initial release
