I’m trying to create a sort of video-game style flashy spell-casting effect. Right now, I have a series of enochian symbols that spray forth at random from a pflow source. Rather than just spitting them out, what I’d like to do is make this set of particles invisible, and have a second series of much smaller particles emit and roughly orbit the outlines of the original system.
Is there a way I can use particles to act as a force (presumably Path Follow) on another particle system?
One method would be to hand animate some find target helpers and use a few individual particle flow setups so if you wanted 6 streams, 6 different pflow setups. You could also try making a simple pflow that emits sphere geometry as the main system, use the mesher compund object to make a dumb mesh version of this and then make a second pflow system that uses find target with your mesher object as a target - pflow hates this type of reference though. It’d be better to try doing something like baking the first pflow animation to normal objects in the scene so you get the movement of the main pflow as dumb keyframed spheres, then you can safely set up the second pflow for your orbiting particles using the spheres as targets.
Do a search on scriptspot.com for particle flow bake and something should come up.
You’d need box#3 to get enough control to do it in one system unfortunately, or some of the functionality in thinking particles.
I opted not to go in this direction for the very reasons you outline-- but I really wanted to thank you for the advice! It saved me a lot more time wrestling with it before reaching what would have been the same conclusion.
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