Hi Michel
thank you for your input
in general you can use individual objects an animate them on multiple layers in order to get the animation you are looking for, like exploding objects, as long as the count is reasonable.
Another option if you have tons of vertices and lots of detail then you might want to export object sequences as morphtargets from 3d Studio, this allows you to do any kind of animation.
I agree that the following shaders would be great to add:
- bumpmap
- reflectivity (specular map)
- HDRI environment map (which can be hidden and only the effect shown on the object)
- depth of field
I do have these on our shader todo list , too
technically all of them could be done with the current engine, one texture sampler that is not yet included in our shader engine is a cubemap sampler which is usefull for hdri texture if they are in a cubemap format
instead you could use spherical maps that can be output by the DomeMaster tool and use these type of maps with the default 2D texture sampler.
for depth of field there is also the possiblity to create gaussian blur based on the distance to the camera view point, this one is a bit complex but not impossible to do.
In general all the requested shaders can be done with the current Aeon FX engine.
Regarding fire and simple smoke with the particle engine, here it is important to use the right textures that give you the result you are looking for.
I have been working a lot with particle illusion in the past and it is quite incredible what you can do with the right mixture of emitters and shapes.
Regarding smoke you could create some prerendered downsampled perlin noise maps and animate 3 or 4 maps on top of each other.
I hope these hints help you finding the right direction
Kind regards
Jan Huewel