I am trying to create an animation that uses a spiral to push particles in a certain direction. The spiral that I am using in my final animation is animated with a Quaternion TCB roation controller (but the one that is in the video below is just animated simply by rotation on the axis (no controller). For some reason the particles detect one of the two UDeflectors (the one they detect is the base plane/floor that the particles lay on. What my video please and tell me where I went wrong (In video I show all settings and particle view layout, tell me if you can’t read the setting numbers because of the quality of the video, and I will post them). Thank you for you help, I hope there is a simple solution to this problem.
PFSource UDeflector/Animated Spiral HELP!
charleyc
#2
The main reason that this is not working for you is that in this situation, the collision test gets confused if you have both deflectors in the same Op (I could guess why, but Oleg could answer this better). If you put your screw deflector in its own op and the ground deflector in its own op (below the screw deflector op) you should start getting results. However, because you are dealing with infinitely small points, the time it takes to pass through these events can allow gravity to push some of the particles below the intersection plane of the ground deflector…thus some fall through. The most obvious solution that comes to mind would be to send the screw deflected particles into a different Event adjusted to compensate through either speed settings or force settings. This may not work in all situations. You could also script (or use box3…referred:)) to adjust particles as they fall through the ground. This is not as easy, but doable.
The best solution here would be to use a dynamics tool to evaluate shape collisions and you should get better results. The cheapest way would be to use Reactor, but that may not be feasible with the number of objects you need. You could also use a tool like Thinking Particles (not cheap) which already has good shape collision dynamics, or you can wait for Box2.
I hope this puts you on the right track 
Thank you for all the help. I did eventually solve the problem. I put both the deflectors in their own op and then I putted the force op (gravity) to the top of the stack. I didn’t know that the order of the stack makes any difference, but it does. Thanks for the help again!
charleyc
#4
Generally it doesn’t make such a difference for collision ops (at least what I have experienced) but in general the order does make a big difference.
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