CGTalk - Particles question

DJ-Wood

02-24-2003, 04:52 PM

I'm trying to create the effect of surface dust being sucked up by a pipe. (I don't have a great deal of experience using particle systems!)

I know that I can place 'gravity' inside of the pipe to attract particles towards it at the appropriate velocity. My question is: how do I create an authentic pile of dust, that will sit static on a flat plane until sucked up by the pipe?

(thanks in advance to anyone who can help!)

BrandonD

02-24-2003, 07:36 PM

Since particles are infinitely small (in all packages) they can't be piled on each other. To give this impression you should make a pile object and lay particles on it's suface. To make it so that particles are only sucked into the pipe near the spout you'll want to use the Decay parameter on the Gravity/Wind (whatever) space warp. This applies attenuation to the effect. You might want to add a polygon inside the tube for the particles to collide with, then set the particles to die on collision.

edaddy

02-24-2003, 08:11 PM

i would set it up to just have the pipe spitting out particles normally and then reverse the animation in your editing program so it'll 'suck em back up'

edit: and about the appearance of dust, i would probably animated a texture map - multi layer i guess

MFreywald

02-24-2003, 08:17 PM

Actually, Spray Master from Digimation will take act as a particle emitter and pile the particles on top one another. But it's not exactly a particle system once you 'spray' it onto a surface. It's then either turned into a bunch of objects or one lump sum of the particles as one object. So maybe a solution, maybe not. Prob depends most on your CPU and RAM available.

DJ-Wood

02-26-2003, 03:20 PM

Hey guys,

Thanks for your advice - very helpful!

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