Bombing the Bomber

This is a random test I did today - it may be common knowledge and you may scratch your head and wonder what the heck I'm going on about but hey I made all these screen shots so gotta post them.

I was adding lots of details to a filter via multiple Bombers and it was crawling so I had an idea I wanted to test.

I set up the Bomber two different ways. The first 'regular' way I just fed 3 ellipses to the 5 particle slots, and used a Perlin noise for the chance.



and on the second try I fed the 3 ellipses into 3 offset components, then used a Multiblend to feed the result combined images into 1 particle slot (using multiple slots with option 2 renders the exact same image so I imagine they are one of top of the other (hmm... another idea there).



I attached the .ffxml in case you want to verify.

I set the parameters of the bomber exactly the same. The result is a rather large image but you can see them side by side.



Not only does the second option, with 4 additional components render substantially faster but to my eye, even the results are 'fuller' and appear to be more random - though logic tells me that shouldn't be the case. (OT: does anyone have a script or some way to compare render times?).

Again this may be me excited about nothing but I wanted to add a lot of critters to a coral filter and this second way seems to provide a way without making everything crawl.

ffxml file

The test was with FF 2.014 Pro.

Great - thanks! I guess that is a version 3 option have to try it on my laptop tomorrow but just eyeballing it and hitting "Next Variant" as fast as I can I can see a substantial difference.