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peterstenhouse
03-22-2006, 05:57 PM
Little Problem. I have created a beautiful animation of a delicate butterfly. I would like to instance this to particles flowing along a curve. I have successfully done this, and even got them aiming in the the direction they are travelling in. However my difficulty is getting the butterflies to flap individually or at different rates, rather than all at once in a great big flap. I have tried creating copies of my butterfly and offsetting the animation and then instanceing them, but for some reason only one of the instanced geometries will rotate properly. I am not so good at expressions but I imagine there is someway of getting the butterflies to have different start times during their animation loop. If it can be done in Lightwave then surely Maya can do it to and better!
Thanks for your help.
I have seen tutorials on getting butterflys to flap by cycling through geometry at different stages of animation, But I don't want to do this as I want motion blur, but I also have a slightly more complex animation than a simple wing movement.
Sincerely
Peter
manali
03-22-2006, 09:06 PM
Hello OpticBlast,

Lets say you have 5 copies of the animated buterfly. Then you instance them and as you say you only see one of them in the instances. Ok, now you go to the particle shape of the instances and add one General dynamic atribute. Need to be Float and per particle (array). give any name. Now you have to give a creation expression for that attributte. If the name is INDEX, you write the name of the particle shape and the attribute name Partisbuterfly1Shape.index = rand(0,6); and now you go to the General Options in the Instancer tab of the partilces and where it say ObjectIndex you select the INDEX attribute you create. If you dont see these attribute you click before the Allow all data type.

Hope is clear and work for you
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03-22-2006, 09:06 PM
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