Hi Allen, you do some amazing stuff ive learnt alot so far 
One question, I was going to email you but I suppose heres a good as place as any.
I was wondering how you do the arrow shooting into the wall in that demo vid of yours?
It would be very cool in my scene im doing atm for College.
(Btw Im at The Computer Graphics College in Sydney, I heard you came here and did a few short lessions a while back :D)
hey there darkclown - as I recall I think it was just a matter of telling it to “stop” on collision I believe, or even a position object I’m not sure. but basically on a collision event it would go to the next event, which would either have a position object… or else it at least told it to “stop” on collision. it also secondly referenced some particle animation of it wobbling based on event age into the event, so it wobbled when it went into the new event.
it’s really simple to set up.
you’re in luck today as I brought my external hd into work… lemme track down the scene file…
hah you’re not in luck I just packed my HD up I just remembered, too much work to unpack it 
lemme check if I inc.'d on my my dvd… (sorry thinking outloud now)
okay you’re in luck… I just built up the scene for you… 2 things… you probably can use a position object, I just used a standard deflector here, but you could do a position object and lock onto it in theory. secondly for animating it I used an xform as it won’t read the transforms into the particle, so xform will be a sure thing.
http://www.allanmckay.com/tmp/arrows_stick(amckay).max
RE: CGC.
Yeah did a short 3 day course on visual effects just before I broke into freelance and moved over to LA some few years ago. Kind of was unorganized as I ran out of time as I was stuck up at Cutting Edge finishing off a film at the time. Actually been thinking of doing a day or two doing something like that whilst back in Bris as it’d be cool to meet up with a lot of people in sydney and also do a talk on that stuff.
doing a master class this year on visual effects if anyone’s going to be in LA 
Allan do you have some shattering tuts on your DVD???
That would be really cool…so I should break the object with parray and fed it into pflow??? but how do I do it that the pieces stay in place and then shatter if they were hit???..do I have to assign on piece to one particle???
[http://forumel.free.fr/PF/cracking00-sor.mov]
here is a quick Cracking geometry test .
I wanted to try to use non automatic shattering (like alan’s script) to manualy draw the fragments shapes.
I create a surface, cut it in pieces using EditPoly 's cut, then I use Bobo’s script to convert the fragments to Particles.
bobo’s script :
[http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/mxs5/pflow/pflow__Chunks_Basics.htm]
know , Im tired and I will drink tequilas and beers and vomit too in L. A. tonight
PS: my L.A. is Loire Atlantique.
Just before u start vomiting (hey u can take the opportunity to study fluid motion ), lemme tell u that cracking scene looks really great! Really really great! Congrats and have one for me
(France is pratically in the quarter-finals now, so u can have some more to celebrate lol)
Alan and Bobo’s script in action.
So easy to use :
just change “Sphere01” to the name of your object in alan’s script and “$Box*” to “$FracPiece_*” in bobo’s
thx them
[http://forumel.free.fr/PF/simple_fractur.mov]
here is the max file
[http://forumel.free.fr/PF/simple_fractur.rar]
yeah I haven’t gotten time to read any of bobo’s stuff yet :\ I have it all saved, one of these days I’m going to go through it all though
The trick is to read the original objects position I think and then add the particle to that position and then link that object to it. (if you were to physically link the object to the particle) although you can also use it as an insteaded piece by reading in the .mesh information.
Yeah I have some fracture stuff on my DVD but it’s quite different to this, it’s not too intuitive although it’s showing how to say “when this particle goes into this event, it’s psuedo linked object morphs” so you’re able to not only get aparticle to fall or crack, but also morph into a more gnarled version (aka something simple like noise applied). this was more just showing ways to get pflow to break away from standard particle practices.
DVD will be out any day now heh. just got an email from Turbo Squid saying that it’s taken a bit more time than anticipated to build the interface for it because there’s so much stuff on there to build menu’s/interface for So I guess that’s a good thing.
Loran that’s a great example nice work!
that’s pretty cool allan…can’t wait for that DVD…
really awesome work there loran…I have to check out bobo’s script…nice work
I animated a shoal of fishes with ParticleFlow. Is anyone interested in a tutorial on how to do this? :shrug:
Thanks alot Allan really helped me out there, one thing only though and it prob sounds really silly but what to use to get the arrows to face the direction I want? atm they are all shooting out at the angle I made them hit the ground and are not changing
to make the arrows face the direction they are travelling, set the roation controller to “speed Space follow” (from the drop down list at the top).
ggrrrr, said I would show my little film 2 weeks ago. I am not a fan of compressing video. I cannot get it under 80MB’s for some spastic reason.
but now I’ve finished Uni!!! horrah!!! Spend much time not being able to walk in a straight line.
Glu3d: This thing looks AWESOME!!! Just downloaded it, going to spend the next long time in this thing methinks, hehehe.
Allan: Nice fire tut. I made one with a blue and green mix, looks pretty cool.
Loran: Very good looking fracture stuff there. After my trime with Glu3d, I gotta play with that. atm, the stuff you guys are saying is going over my head a bit… I am hoping that that had something to do with the alcohol, hehe.
Ok, i finally wrote the tutorial. I thought its too simple first, but perhaps it helps someone who is just starting using particle flow…
wonderful thread!
regards, rohit
P.S. Now, i’ll receive the notification about new posts. ; - )
Hi Loran…can you help me with that fracturing thing…I tried that with bobo’s script and it works but I want that it starts later not at frame 0 …well I’m not a scripter so can you help me with that one please???
thanks alot
and Allan what about your system for breaking glass…will you show us your results when your finished?? (actually can’t wait to see it)
I am getting confused with the new look of cgtalk
anyway you should be able to set it by simply changing the start frame from 0 to what ever you like.
well I did that but it didn’t worked, all the particles were gone when I set the start time any different than 0 so I think there has to be some scripting…I don’t know, but thanks anyway
Here is a fun test using Allan’s “fracture” script and Bobo’s PF birthscript.
the video:
[http://forumel.free.fr/PF/blaster-sor.mov]
the max file:
[http://forumel.free.fr/PF/blaster.rar]
ENJOY!