Controlling Particles in a large scene scale

#1

Hello folks,
I have been breaking my head over this, but how does one control the speed/emission of the particles in a large scene scale ? I have to add dust to the cart going down hill and the size of the set is pretty huge and makes it difficult to control the particles. In my old work place we had a tool that we used to scale the scene down, without affecting the animation. Of course I cant do that here as the animation curves go wonka. Sub sampling the particles won’t help either as I will have to go beyond the figures Maya can understand. The distance of the animation is huge. Does anyone have a work around or better suggestions ? Its kind of urgent.
Thanks much.

#2

Have you tried the Space Scale in the Scale Attribues in the Nucleus?
(Assuming you’re using nParticles that is…)

#3

I am trying to slow down the movement of the particle. Like a drag field or damping them. The camera and the emitter are moving too fast. Hence I somehow need to slow down the speed of the particles. Like cut the velocity by more than half. Any suggestions ?

#4

First off I would try subsampling when you cache the particles.

When you cache the particles, open the option box ( nCache>create new cache[] ).
At the bottom of the dialog:

Evaluate every 0.1
Save every 5

This will calculate each particle 10 times every frame and save 2 samples per frame to the cache (for motion blurring purposes). You should see smoother, less clumpy motion from nParticles emitted from fast moving emitters.

Be aware, though, that it will change the behaviour of your particles. You may need to increase the magnitude of any forces acting on your nParticles.

Hope this helps

#5

That is what I have done with the regular particles. Playback - 0.200 and oversamples by 5 when creating the disk cache. But doesn’t seem to do much. Not sure if it is the same as you mentioned with nParticles

#6

You can always check by changing your playback rate:

Type in this MEL command:

playbackOptions -by 0.1

And play your simulation. You go back to normal with:

playbackOptions -by 1.0

#7

Bake out all of the animation, so you can delete any rigs (if there are any) Then group everything into a single group, including the camera and scale it down until it’s at your desired size. If the animation gets jacked up, which it shouldn’t but if it does, check to make sure you have Euler filtering turned on in the graph editor.

Then you should be good to go.

#8

Hey thanks mate,
That’s how I did it in the end. But the velocity from the emitter was really high. Still is. Which is too trouble some. Scaling down didn’t help much. I would like to cancel the velocity on the emitters or somehow damp the particles. The camera is moving pretty fast too, which makes it look jittery.

#9

Give this a try. Parent your particles to your moving object. and use fields and adjust attributes to fix simulation from there.

#10

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