Dust Particles??Need direction

#1

Hi guys, if this problem has already been solved maybe someone can point me to a tutorial they know of. Because I cant particularly find one.

I just have a scene that I want some very suttle dust particles floating around. So they would be just slightly/slowly floating around randomly.

So far whenever I put gravity in the particles either keeping flying up, or if I change the gravity settings to be higher they just fall straight down. So that seems like I should’t even be putting it into pflow.

So if there are any tips for very slow moving and slightly floating around particles that would be awsesome!

#2

Take a look at two things - allan mckays dispersing particle tutorials for the subtle movement you mention - it’s the turbulence setting of the wind space warp and it’s reeeeeeeaaaaly sensitive. the other thing is Neil blevins smoke this script from scriptspot.com - it’ll make a basic particle system that uses single polygon facing particles with layers of noise to make something that looks like soft smoke / clouds. One tutorial for the movement, the other for the look.

#3

If you just want particles floating around your scene, set the PF Source to a Rectangle or Sphere, and set the PositionIcon operator to Volume. Now set your birth (start and finish) to frame 0 (or possibly a second or two in the past). As long as you have removed any Speed operators, you should have a cloud of stationary particles. Now add a Wind space warp, set the turbulence to something low like 0.01, the Freq to 0.01 and the Scale to 0.01. Add a Force operator that references the Wind and now you should have your particles moving around. If they are moving too fast or too slow, play with the Turbulence value. If they are moving in too large of a pattern, increase the Scale (higher numbers make smaller swirlies). Now add a Drag space warp and apply it to the Force operator. Drag will slow everything down over time.

Play with those settings and you should be in the ballpark.

#4

Thanks so much for the replies!!

After playing around with it the particles kept sort of flying around to one side and dropping down. Once I followed your settings, then added a “Keep Apart” it worked!!! Exactly what I wanted! The wind is super super touchy, I had to use super low values to get what i wanted. I think adding something like a vortex might help too with a bit more random motion.

Thanks again.

#5

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