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Maya 2009

Posted: Oct 10, 2008
Category: Events

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With Maya2009 now available I hope to post some new examples using nParticles soon. NParticles is derived from the classic Maya particle system, but has a revamped UI and many new features, such as mesh output, a fluid solver and most significantly integration with the nucleus solver. I will try to make most of the examples I showed at Siggraph available. If you've not yet seen it you can check out the full Autodesk Siggraph Usergroup show here:
Siggraph User Group
You can see my segment by clicking on "04" just below the time slider on that page

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Newest users comments View All 9 Comments

	Posted by D.V.R on Oct 22, 2009 at 03:24 AM
hi duncan u r tutorials are very good i want to know how to do a whirlpool in maya could u please help me in that?

	Posted by porchb@hhmi.org on Jul 16, 2009 at 03:33 PM
Hi again Duncan, I'm trying to "duplicate special" a string of nParticle objects and when I do they sort of blow up for lack of a better description. When I duplicate as copy I lose radius size and they propagate in the wrong direction. When I duplicate as instance they are the right size and go in the right direction but they don't render. Any ideas?

	Posted by porchb@hhmi.org on Apr 15, 2009 at 09:35 PM
Thanks Duncan. Your tutorials and helpful hints are greatly appreciated. Blake

Posted by Duncan Brinsmead on Apr 15, 2009 at 09:10 PM

I'm guessing that they are converting to poly, it is likely that the triangle size is too large. It is also a good idea to make your threshold at least a little greater than zero and increase the blobby radius scale a bit. Then lower the triangle size to the maximum value that works OK for you. Also the quad mesh with a smooth value of 3 will generally be a lot faster than using the other methods.

Duncan

Posted by porchb@hhmi.org on Apr 15, 2009 at 08:10 PM

Thanks for the feedback Duncan. I actually did some experimentation and found what I was looking for. As you suggest, I took the jPivToParticle.mel from highend3d and just changed the "string $cmd = "particle ";" line to "string $cmd = "nParticle ";" and it worked.

I'm doing molecular animations and typically convert pdb molecular data to spheres, then use the jPivToParticle.mel to replace the geometries with particles and render as blobbies. I just got maya 2009 and was very excited to be able to convert nParticles to polys to have the blobby look with the rendering and deformation capabilities of polys. I'm halfway there... for some reason the nParticles I've created don't convert to polys. Any ideas?