f l o w allows one to interactively construct sophisticated particle systems and render the results either in real-time via OpenGL or off-line by a RenderMan compliant renderer. f l o w can also 'render' a particle system to code. Using a project template, f l o w fills in the required code to automatically produce demos or screensavers.

    f l o w is not intended to be a typical modeling/animation package. Although it does have limited polygonal object import capability, its main purpose is to fiddle around with particle systems and shaders.

    f l o w will be perpetually under development, so some functionality may be incomplete and there are many features that have not yet been implemented. However, it is reasonably stable and quite usable in its current form. I started flow somewhere around October 98, and worked on it solid for about a year. Development has been slower recently, but there are still a lot of things I want to add.

   f l o w runs on Linux and IRIX. It should port easily to other UNIXes supported by Qt and BMRT.

features:

• real-time animation - OpenGL previews of the particle systems. Particles can be drawn as points, lines, or textured quads.

• off-line rendering - outputs RIB and calls an external RenderMan compliant renderer to handle the scene. Particles can be rendered as spheres, capped tubes, or camera-facing disks.

• scene building - simple scenes can be constructed with polygons, quadrics, planes and boxes. All surfaces can use surface and displacement shaders to add visual richness.

• shader editor - integrated shader tweaker allows full access to all surface and displacement shader parameters.

• code generation - 'render' a particle animation to code. crank out cool screensavers with ease.

• multiple orthographic views - lights, particle actions, and geometry can be manipulated in orthographic viewports.

• interactive camera recording - intuitive mouse driven camera controls can be recorded during particle simulations for later playback.

• multiprocessor rendering - multiple frames of an animation may be rendered concurrently and will scale to any number of CPUs.

Particle System API is
(c) Copyright 1997-1998 by David K. McAllister

Blue Moon Rendering Tools are
(c) Copyright 1990-1998 by Larry I. Gritz.  All rights reserved.

The RenderMan (R) Interface Procedures and RIB Protocol are:
Copyright 1988, 1989, Pixar.  All rights reserved.
RenderMan (R) is a registered trademark of Pixar.