particle system path use

[RogerWickes]

If you have a sketch or ref pic describing what you want it might be more helpful. Do you mean a kind of segmented body along the length of the hair, aka Medussa? If so, Dupliframes is what you want.

[Jannemann]

Hi Roger,
thanks for your answer. I have no experience with dupliframes, but from shortly reading I am not sure if it would work in this case. Specifically I want to model the tubes of worms and place them randomly over a rock, like you can see in the sketch (the red indicates the original hair curve). And I thought I could somehow use the hair spline and particle system, to place all the tubes randomly over an area and use the curvature to generate differently looking tubes.
Greetings Jan

sketch (http://www.one4babel.com/tubes.jpg)

[phoenixart]

Jan,

you can definitely use the particle system either you need a still or an animated solution.
Basically what you need is:
1 - Main mesh emitting particles, let's say something like a sphere
2 - Particles, in your case the tubes
3 - Set up the sphere emitter to use object or group in the visualization panel

http://phoenixart.com/temp/Blender3D/tube_grass0001.jpg

When you make this just bear in mind a few things:
1 - The group needs to have all the meshes with the same center as the main emitting mesh. I usually prepare the scene keeping the cursor at 0,0,0 and then I'll move the emitter as I need.
2 - Set the Dynamic to normal to makes the tubes follow the mesh surface (you'll probably need to rotate the group to get the right rotation)
3 - To get more randomness you can play with the Random parameter in the "Emit From" and with the Rand. value in the Extras panel to vary the size.

http://phoenixart.com/temp/Blender3D/tube_grass_particles.jpg

As far I remember on Blenderartist someone posted a clever example of how to have the tube animated as they were a marine creature...

[kernond]

Here's an in-depth tutorial that I did illustrating the technique suggested by "phoenixart":
http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com/2009/02/painting-instanced-objects-into-your.html

The tutorial shows how to "paint" in the particles on the surface of the emitter. If you don't want to manually control the placement, you can use the settings shown in phoenixart's post. The difference is that if you want Blender to place them, set a value in the Amount field. If you set the Amount value to zero, you can go into Particle Edit mode and place them manually. You can also use some of the hair editing tools like combing, etc.

[Jannemann]

Piero and Kernon,
Thanks a lot for the help and the link to the tutorial.
that really looks like the thing I want to do. I will post a render ofthe final results, if I get it done. But probably it will take me a while.
Greetings,
jan

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