Maya 2009

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?

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?

Thanks Duncan. Your tutorials and helpful hints are greatly appreciated.
Blake

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

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?

Currently there is no automated way to convert particles to nParticles( even though nParticles derives from particles, and thus shares all its attributes). One could do it in a mel script, but it is a bit involved to handle all the cases. I've been meaning to write such a script but have been busy with other tasks. In the script one might first create an nParticle using the "nParticle" command, then copy all the attributes and connections from the particle to the nParticle system. One could generally get the attributes to copy using listAttr on the particle, as any attribute on the particle will also exist on the particle system. One could also simply assign the shaders for the particle to the nParticle.

Duncan

Duncan,
Is there a way to convert particles to nParticles?

Looking forward to these.

Go D!

what are the chances that a hard working sole proprieter will have access to nDynamics? Some of us can only afford Complete, and that's still quite a bit of money.