jesped
05-17-2003, 03:59 PM
I'm trying to animate the typical fish bank using particles, and surprisingly that thing that looked very simple at first it's giving me one of the worst headaches in months :annoyed:
I tried first a Pcloud with a fish animated with wave binding from a soft-selection as a custom object per particle. All went ok but orientation, there's no way I can get all the fishes in the bank aligned in the Z axis :-P the "Direction of Travel/Mblur" option in the Rotation and Collision section was the only thing I found to make particles "follow" the orientation of the path, but doesn't maintain the alignment to Z axis.
then I tried Particle studio, and although I didn't found an event to assign a spline path for the motion of the particles it can be done usign objects (as seen in a tutorial from the help file). All went ok except when I tried to assign my fish as a custom object... 3dsmax died :-( tried many changes to the fish object and the particle events setup and got max crashed all the time. bleurg! :-P
now trying with Particle Flow, which btw it's pretty similar to Particle Studio. Ok, no constant crashes here (but still some ones) and I managed to do it but... the particle fishes doesn't get the animation of the fish object. I swear that "Animated" option is activated in the Custom shape operator and I even changed the wave animation to a local Wave modifier instead of a Space warp and later (cos it didn't work) changed it again to an animated FFD, that didn't work either... argghh (15 minutes after finishing this message: max crashed again and after relaunch and loading the autobackup file the animation of the fish custom object worked)
Anyway, the fishes doesn't get a smooth orientation across the path points, and there's some jerky motion at the end that I simply don't understand.
I feel like a stupid because I KNOW it can't be so dificult. I'm almost in the mood to do it in Realflow :rolleyes: so I would appreciate some help and any advice on how to improve this animation.
I'm using 3dsmax 5.1 SP1 with DX9 patch
Check the samples to see what I'm talking about (the fish in the front is the custom object) and many thanks in advance.
http://www.nextlimit.com/jesped/particle_view.gif
http://www.nextlimit.com/jesped/fish_bank.mov
I tried first a Pcloud with a fish animated with wave binding from a soft-selection as a custom object per particle. All went ok but orientation, there's no way I can get all the fishes in the bank aligned in the Z axis :-P the "Direction of Travel/Mblur" option in the Rotation and Collision section was the only thing I found to make particles "follow" the orientation of the path, but doesn't maintain the alignment to Z axis.
then I tried Particle studio, and although I didn't found an event to assign a spline path for the motion of the particles it can be done usign objects (as seen in a tutorial from the help file). All went ok except when I tried to assign my fish as a custom object... 3dsmax died :-( tried many changes to the fish object and the particle events setup and got max crashed all the time. bleurg! :-P
now trying with Particle Flow, which btw it's pretty similar to Particle Studio. Ok, no constant crashes here (but still some ones) and I managed to do it but... the particle fishes doesn't get the animation of the fish object. I swear that "Animated" option is activated in the Custom shape operator and I even changed the wave animation to a local Wave modifier instead of a Space warp and later (cos it didn't work) changed it again to an animated FFD, that didn't work either... argghh (15 minutes after finishing this message: max crashed again and after relaunch and loading the autobackup file the animation of the fish custom object worked)
Anyway, the fishes doesn't get a smooth orientation across the path points, and there's some jerky motion at the end that I simply don't understand.
I feel like a stupid because I KNOW it can't be so dificult. I'm almost in the mood to do it in Realflow :rolleyes: so I would appreciate some help and any advice on how to improve this animation.
I'm using 3dsmax 5.1 SP1 with DX9 patch
Check the samples to see what I'm talking about (the fish in the front is the custom object) and many thanks in advance.
http://www.nextlimit.com/jesped/particle_view.gif
http://www.nextlimit.com/jesped/fish_bank.mov