Patrick's VFX Blog

I made another video showing the process from method 2, trying to removing the initial state from particles.

I came home to do a more exhaustive search for the case of the un-reset-able initial state of Maya particles. I came across a message thread  from area.autodesk.com hosted by Autodesk .  It says when the initial state is set, there will be a folder created in the current project called "initial state". Once this folder is removed, particles will lose their initial state information on the first frame of the previously set frame-range.  A user even contributed 2 lines of MEL commands. Select the particle object and run the following : setAttr ".position0" -type "vectorArray" 0; setAttr ".lifespanPP0" -type "doubleArray" 0; This zeroes out the particle's  per-particle attribute  called  position0   (this is the per-particle's initial state's position in local space), and set the lifespan to zero.  I tried setting my project workspace, created a particle object and set my initial state for the particles. True enough

I made a video showing this process of resetting Maya's initial state that's set on particles.