We are creating smoke using particle systems. We are using camera facing planes and was wondering if it is possible to have the smoke constrained to an invisible-to-camera shape?

Hope that made sense.

TIA

Dean

Max Design 2012 SP2 / Win 7 Pro
NVidia Quadro FX 4800 x 2 (non sli)
HP Z800 - 2 Xeon X5680 @ 3.33 GHz; 36 GB ram

You can check out the Path Follow space warp under forces. It’s pretty self explanatory in the help file. You might also consider other space warps to give it a more random, natural feeling depending on its purpose…

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC

Yes, Create the shape that you want it constrained to, and give the shape a material with 0 opacity. The camera wont see it, but the particles will react with it.

Windows XP 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon X5482 3.20GHz
32GB RAM
NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700
Dual 20” Dell LCD monitors.
3ds Max 2009 64-bit
Adobe Creative Suite 2

We got the particles constraied to a custom shape using PCloud.  But now I can’t use my smoke texture.  I have a Standard texture using an Opacity mask with a Gradient ramp with noise for the smoke texture and a puff-shaped bitmap I painted in Photoshop for the mask.  This texture worked find on a PF Source particle system using Shape Facing.  But when I try it on the PCloud, it doesn’t render.  I’m using Mental Ray to render, so I tried making an Arch&Design with just the puff bitmap for the refraction transparency and that doesn’t work either.  If I set the transparency to 50% I can see teh base color, but the opacity map isn’t working at all.

Is there a better way to make a smoke texture for particles? 

Also, I applied the texture to the PF Source in the Particle View, but the PCloud doesn’t show up in there.  Why is that?

Thanks!
Kara

Here’s a simple animation of particles emitting from a teapot using PCloud. I animated a standard material with a gradient ramp for opacity to fade out after 50 frames and assigned it to the PCloud which is in turn set to get the material from the icon. The one thing to notice with the material is it has to be set to Face Map for it to map correctly on the particle planes.

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC

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Thankyou!!!  Checking Face Map did the trick. :-)