About Splash                               

Splash is a 4D particle system for Windows aimed at the lower end of the market. It was built primarily for Imagine Users as it supports the AutoCAD DXF and Imagine TDDD formats although it can be used with any other program that supports either of these formats. The fourth dimension is of course Time making it an animation environment.

Particles are a method of creating effects in 3D computer graphics which would be extremely hard to model by hand. The computer calculates the motion of up to 32,000 particles based on simple values that you control making it easy for you to alter the whole animation in seconds.

Splash is a stand alone program. You create a 3D particle object in another 3D program, or use one of the ones provided with Splash, and you export the final animation to an external 3D program to render it.

Many different effects can be created using Splash for example; water fountains, explosions, whirlwinds, smoke, foam to name just a few.

Particle Controls:

  • Number of Frames
  • Number of Particles Emitted per Frame.
  • Emission Type: Circular, Spherical or Cubic
  • Filled or Outline Emission Type.
  • X, Y and Z initial velocities
  • Random Spread
  • Elasticity (bouncyness)
  • Viscosity of the Environment
  • Gravity
  • Wind
  • Height of a ground object that the particles can bounce off.
All of these controls are keyframable which means that they can be changed at different frames in the animation.

Export Options:
  • AutoCAD (*.dxf)
  • Imagine TDDD pre v1.3 (*.iob)
  • Imagine TDDD v1.3 (*.iob)
  • Imagine Blobs (*.iob)
Splash deals with point, edge and face data only. You cannot import a textured particle object and expect each particle to be individually textured upon export. You must texture the particle animation after exportation in your chosen rendering software.

File Structures:
AutoCAD export produces a series of files named MyAnim1.dxf to MyAnim100.dxf if you have 100 frames i.e. one file for each frame. You can select which particular frames you want to export.
For all Imagine export options you get a single MyAnim.iob file which will contain a number of states named "Frame 0001" to "Frame 0100" for example (although again you can select which frames to export). Imagine Blobs export also allows you to specify the size of the spheres upon export. This is how the "foam" and "splash" animations were created in the gallery.
If am fairly certain Splash will be compatible with Imagine v3 as Splash only deals with basic data such as points, edges, faces and blob spheres, which I expect will stay the same. If there are any major compatibility problems when v3 is released I'll see what they are and hopefully release a free update.