maya nParticle to simulate the cell behavior

#1

hi all! I am an architectural student doing a project using maya. Our studio is kind of like learning from the biological data and turning it into the architectural form. I am researching the bottle cell transformation from column to wedge shape so that the whole system would bend. Here i want to make a simulation using nparticle. Each cell is a particle system with three elements. By mapping the radius of each particle(red circles) and also the length of the cell(blue lines)i would have some equations related to time. I know i can use the per particle attribute to change the size of the particle. But i dont know how to control the distance between particles. Also, i want the bottom particle always stick together without any gap. I guess i should use script to do it?

I am a so so begin with maya. Can anyone give me a hint about this project? Any opinion is welcomed ! I would appreciate it very much! Thank you!

HELP ME PLEASE!

#2

It sounds like you are referring to some image I’m not seeing in your post. At any rate, without fully understanding what you are trying to do, perhaps using 3 different particle systems might work for you. Create an nConstraint between each particle system and set the connectionMethod to componentOrder. If you want to snap the length of the constraints to a fixed distance, instead of using the distance at creation time, you could set the constraint restLengthMethod to constant and set the restLength value.

#3

here is the image. Thank you Duncan!
I am changing the radiuspp using some equations. But somehow maya crashes all the time as I adding more particles into the model(fatal problem). Is there any way to solve this problem? Thank you so much for helping me.

#4

Is is crashing as particles are added during simulation, or instead when you start with more than a certain number of particles? If it is a very large particle count, check your memory use.

Otherwise I would try eliminating elements of the simulation until it stops crashing to isolate the problem. For example does it crash without constraints?

#5

Instead of a constraint you might find springs useful. You can explicitly set these up in your scripts and they might handle changing particle counts better for this example.

#6

Yeah… I deleted all the component to component constraints and i can save the file! Then as you said, I tried to add the springs under the soft and rigid bodies, because i am using nParticles instead of particles, the error came out as " Shape is not a valid rigid body". Is there any way i can do within the nParticles? Thank you so much!
Here I attached an image of my model, ugly though.

#7

Why are you not using the nParticles:create springs menu?

#8

God… so embarrassed… I am so silly. Sorry…:hmm: Thank you for your patience Duncan. you are so nice!

#9

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