lay particles to a surface...

[mark_wilkins]

Sure! You have to select the surface and the particle object and make the surface a goal (I think there's a "Goal" menu item on the Particles menu but since I'm moving and my Maya machine's packed up I can't really go look.)

The easiest thing to do at this point is to assign goalU and goalV attributes to each particle that correspond to the location on the surface where you want each particle to go.

Another approach that MIGHT work is to apply a gravity field to the particles and then create a particle expression, set to run after dynamics, that sets each particle's acceleration to zero when it's gotten to the surface. I haven't fully thought through how to make this work though, and it's a slightly more skanky solution.

Maybe there's a more clever way out there that I haven't thought of?

By the way, where things get really neat is when you animate the goalU and goalV to get the particles moving around on the surface. This is a part, for example, of how David Allen at PDI built the water droplet simulation for the Spyder sequence in Minority Report.

-- Mark

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