BetterWind Modifier

This is a modified version of the standard wind modifier that ships with max. The update primarily affects how the turbulence operates, although falloff for wind has been modified too.

The primary aim was to add falloff for the turbulence since the falloff only affected wind, but I ended up adding some other stuff too since that was a two line fix...

Parameters:

Turbulence - as it was.

Frequency - as it was

Scale - as it was but broken out into world X Y Z. Use the 'lock to X scale' to just use the X value to control all 3 axes.

Phase - in the original warp modifier having the frequency at a non-zero value would automatically cause the noise to 'phase' over time - this parameter has been detached from time and broken out to XYZ.

Falloff Controls:
Decay is as it was. Newly added is Start/End, and between these two you get some control over the falloff: linear, smoothstep or exponent.
Mask Planar Falloff allows you to limit a planar icons falloff using a radial falloff in addition to either decay or start/end falloff. In the original, the affect of the warp was infinite on the plane of the icon.

Algorithm Controls:
Noise3 is the original
Turbulence does nothing yet.
fBm1 is fractal brownian motion and uses the H, Lacunarity and Octaves to control the noise. You can find out what these do if you look around the net for fBm info.
Noise4 is the same as noise3 with an additional Phase parameter, which uses just the first control in the fBm/Noise4 control group to control this.

fBm/Noise4 controls:
These affect some of the algorithms, see above.

Display is as it was, updated for the additional falloff types.

Note: I added a bunch of features a while back, but haven't documented them, and I'm no longer exactly sure what some of them do - trial and error will sort you out. Keep distance tried to keep the particles a set distance from a node, you can get interesting effects using this and driving the particles around the distance-sphere using noise. Like:

Preview Here

Limitations:
- 'Turbulence' algorithm does nothing useful (I'll look at this at some stage)
- UI elements don't grey out when they should.
- Range Indicators leave drit on screen (just need to modify the bounding box code methinks), redraw views to clean up.
- To disable falloff entirely, set to 'Decay' mode with decay of 0.0 - I plan to add an 'enabled' checkbox at some stage.
- XYZ's are world based, I'd like them to be icon based at some stage.

BetterWind is free

3dsmax678

3dsmax2008/3dsmax9-32

3dsmax2008/3dsmax9-64

3dsmax2009 32 bit

3dsmax2009 64 bit

3dsmax2010 32 bit

3dsmax2010 64 bit

3dsmax2012 32 bit

3dsmax2012 64 bit

3dsmax2013 64/32 bit

Bugfix: The 2009 version has has the display of the ranges fixed - it never calculated it bounding box correctly before so the falloff ranges could mess up your display a little.

Note that no R5 version is currently available - I'll compile an R5 one if I get enough interest.

Installation instructions
Unzip and copy the downloaded .dlm to your plugins directory then restart max.

Contact bugs@rpmanager.com with any bug info. Scene files demonstrating problems are much easier to troubleshoot.

Credits: BetterWind was written by Grant Adam, with input from Particlemeister Allan Mckay

Thanks to David Baker for suggesting why I couldn't get a stable build in 2012 (deferred loading...)