"Particle" texture coordinates for halo materials:

* Particle age can now be used as the texture x-coordinate, and location in a particle trail as the y-coordinate.
* This finally enables particles in 2.5 to change their color (or any other texturable material property) by their age.
* In 2.4x this was accomplished with the "100 frames == particle age", but this was both non-intuitive and slow as the animation system had to be recalculated for every particle.
* Currently these are 2d coordinates (age/lifetime == x-coordinate, trail particle index/number of trail particles == y-coordinate), but other particle properties or possibly even a user definable property can be added as coordinates in the future.
* On the code side this uses the same coordinate definition number (for halo materials) as strand coordinates (for surface materials). This is also nice as they intuitively mean nearly the same thing, i.e. along strand or during particle life.

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/source/blender/makesdna/DNA_material_types.h b/source/blender/makesdna/DNA_material_types.h
index f8eb6e76693..5a117d59f8a 100644
--- a/source/blender/makesdna/DNA_material_types.h
+++ b/source/blender/makesdna/DNA_material_types.h
@@ -300,6 +300,7 @@ typedef struct Material {
 #define TEXCO_TANGENT	4096
 	/* still stored in vertex->accum, 1 D */
 #define TEXCO_STRAND	8192
+#define TEXCO_PARTICLE	8192 /* strand is used for normal materials, particle for halo materials */
 #define TEXCO_STRESS	16384
 #define TEXCO_SPEED		32768