Turning objects into deflectors?

#1

I apologize if this question is basic, I am just getting acquainted with the basics of particle flow. How do you turn objects into deflectors. For example, I have created a simple poly out of extruded text and I want to make it a deflector for particles. Is there simple way to do that?

#2

Deflectors > UDeflector

pick object

#3

Ah thanks man, I knew it was that simple.
The reason I couldn’t get it to work I now realize is that I had the emitter inside the object and didn’t flip the normals.
I wanted the particles to bounce around inside but now I know that you have to either add a shell modifier or have the normals facing in the direction of the particles for them to deflect.

#4

The bummer is that one UDeflector can only contain one object. Would be great if that restriction was lifted.

#5

hummmm…
attaching some geometries and play with volume select would solve it, no ???

or maybe mult Sub ID´s ??

huummm, thats sounds a tricky…
are there any other way to “fake” it ??

#6

Can’t think of any, except a script that creates lots of UDeflectors, poppulates them, and adds them in a PFLow collision operator.

#7

^That’d be cake. :smiley: I can do that if you really need it, though i’d probably skip adding them to a collision operator since not everybody uses pflow… I’d probably just add them to a selection set so you just do add > hit select by name, and then select the selection set…

#8

Sounds great!

#9

Crap. Total B.S. from the maxscript docs:

[left]NOTE: “There is no way to set the Deflector object using MAXScript.”

[/left]
Now I def. did not expect that one bit… sorry guys! Thought it was gonna be really easy. They really need to redo the whole udeflector thing anyway… it’s pretty crappy, and completley useless when the deflector mesh is animated… :banghead:

#10

Now that’s crappy. I just hope that AME pushes a bit in the FX direction now that the viz direction is full of goodies.

#11

Haha… been wishing that since Max6… (5.1 had pflow if I remember correctly)

#12

if you add all your obects into a group, you put the ground into your udeflector

#13

So there’s a workaround anyways! Not too elegant, but should still work.

#14

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