Reset-ing Maya Particles' Initial State - Method 1

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One of my colleagues ran into a problem with the Maya particles' initial state. He was unable to remove/delete/reset the initial state after setting it, and there seem to be no command to do that.

I remember watching a Gnomon particle dynamics video and hearing it mentioned. The trainer (was Alex Alvarez I think) said to download a script from highend3d.com (that was before it became CreativeCrash.com).
I found some suggestions for fixing this problem at this creativecrash.com forum: http://www.creativecrash.com/forums/dynamics-amp-effects/topics/initial-state

One of the more straightforward suggestions from the forum was to: 
- set the emitter rate to zero, 
- set a very short constant lifespan (for the existing particles at the initial state)
-rewind and play till the initial state particles die
- then set a new initial state when there are no more particles alive in the scene
- This will have gotten rid of the initial state, and we can now go and apply our previous emission settings as before, and continue working with "live" particles.

I'll give this a try tonight and see if it works. :)

Comments

  1. Ryan21 January 2012 at 15:29

    I'm trying to get the first particle effect to work on a Curve Flow.
    http://www.youtube.com/user/fpslovefest
    Do you think you could help?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Patrick Woo25 January 2012 at 03:50

    Hi Ryan, it's nice to meet you. I've watched your link. I'll try and post a brief tutorial on how to achieve this.

    If you are in the midst of a project, and you need an urgent solution, you should give this a try: Use the Volume Curve field on a curve, then use that to affect your particles. You can find the volume curve field from the dynamics menu (or nDynamics) menu -> fields -> volume curve

    Hope this helps for the time-being. However, to make the particle stop at the end of the curve could be more tricky than it looks. If you need the particles to stop at the end of the curve, I'll have to find a straightforward way to do this.

    Its a nice challenge!

    ReplyDelete

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