CGTalk - caching 2 particle-systems in 1 scene

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borisb2

11-19-2009, 08:24 AM

Hi,

following question: I have a scene with one already cached particle-system. If I now want to add another particle-system in the same scene I have to be very careful not to loose my old cache when creating just a cache for the new particles ("Particle Systems to cache: Selected" in the option-box for caching).

I found out, if I set the properties to "read only" on the old cache-files (in the particles folder) I can save the old cache, it will not be deleted when caching just the new ones.

But is there a smarter way to "lock" a cache to prevent from being deleted?

Thanks

redpawFX

11-19-2009, 06:43 PM

welcome to my ultimate frustration with maya particles.. yet I love them.. :-)

Here's what I know,

Mayas DynExport command is very finicky, When you press the cache button in the interface, its actually a wrapper command that does a few things, one of which is to delete the old particles/container directory so that the dynExport command doesent freak out and crash maya.. So it deletes the old particles if they're in that same folder and re-builds them .

You can get around this whole problem by scripting the export of your particles yourself.
by just running the dynExport command to just export the particle object / attributes that you want to. This works pretty well but if by accident you try to export before deleting the old pdc's maya will become unstable / crash.

also it sometimes helps to also script your own frame advance > dynExport frame advance > dynExport loop as well as I have been able to append to current particle caches this way in the past as well.

At some point soon I should just release my cache system GUI but i have to make it cross platform first.. (stupid windows file system calls) anyway...

give that a shot, it should work and you don't have to worry about file locking unless you really want to be sure of things..

-redpawfx

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11-19-2009, 06:43 PM

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