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andymoorer
11-17-2009, 11:01 PM
Here's a noobish question that's kinda driving me insane.... I hope one of you can set me straight.

I have a basic maya particle system which was made and tested with a framerange of 0-200, where it works fine.

I have saved that system and am handing it to an animator who wants to run it in a framerange starting around 500. When they bring it in, maya hangs as it tries to calculate 500 frames of runup.

Setting the start time of the particles doesn't help - it seems because there is a surface goal maya insists on evaluating all these frames. Surely there is a standard workaround? This is a pretty simple, even basic, setup... ?

I've attached an example. Load it directly, everything is fine. Import it into a scene with framerange from 500 to 600, maya hangs while running up to the current frame.
Wick3dParticle
11-17-2009, 11:53 PM
Hey Andy,

Its working fine here.
Make sure that the scene you are importing in to doesn't have any other dynamics in it. It may be that there is another particle or Ndynamic in there that is causing the run up. I tested this on a blank scene and it worked fine as soon as I set the start time to 500.

Good Luck,

~Ilan
andymoorer
11-18-2009, 02:12 AM
Interesting. Happens even when importing into a blank scene...I wonder if we have one of our dynamics preferences set incorrectly. I'll dig around, thanks Ilan!

PS - not sure what I think about maya particles overall, but fluidFX is the bomb. :D
santoshw
11-22-2009, 10:05 PM
try caching the particles
andymoorer
11-23-2009, 02:46 AM
try caching the particles

I'm afraid caching is not feasible given the particulars of the work we're doing, which falls out of the 'normal' workflow used for VFX and render pipelines.

The problem stems from a failure of the maya scene graph to recognize the start frame attribute of the system after the asset is loaded - after we identified this we could implement a workaround, namely opening the affected assets at frame one, and then opening the particle attribute editor. This forces maya to properly evaluate the start frame times and we can then proceed normally.

I have to do a couple of tests to determine if this is a 2010 bug or if it's a result of some aspect of our pipeline interfering somehow, but we've at least got a route to move forward.
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11-23-2009, 02:46 AM
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