flow, version 0.5
Documentation is pretty thin at this point, but hopefully flow will be reasonably intuitive for those familiar with Renderman, the Particle Systems API or 3D concepts/programming in general. My main development system is RedHat 6.1, but flow has also been built on IRIX 6.5(n32).
Please read the Particle System API documentation before using flow. Don't worry too much if it doesn't make immediate sense. I originally began flow as a lightweight front end to the Particle API to help myself get a grasp on what the documentation was all about. The 'Particle Control' widget is pretty much a 1-to-1 mapping of the Particle API's function calls, so you can play around with the parameters and get a more intuitive feel for what it's doing.
If you are not familiar with Renderman or BMRT, "The Renderman Companion" by Steve Upstill is an excellent introduction. You don't need to be a Renderman expert to use flow, but some general knowlege about Renderman and shaders is helpful.
flow still needs a fair amount of work. The most important thing that needs to be added is a way to animate the parameter values, and there's also a lot of stuff that really should be re-written.
This software is distrubuted under terms of the QPL. See the file 'LICENCE.QPL' for details.
Please send any problems, suggestions, complaints, etc. to mba@reptilelabour.com
Cheers,
Mark B. Allan
Thanks:
Simon Windmill for the valuable feedback. Bjoern Graf for PointsPolygons addition.