Navarth 11 January 2012 02:50 AM
This works for generating two different shapes of confetti, I don’t know how it would be done with just one PF Source. (I’d be happy to learn.)
You could do it two ways. The first would be to create the two objects you want in your scene and group them together. Then you can use the shape instance operator instead of the regular shape op and use your group for the object, making sure to check seperate particles for group members. You can also link the objects together, select the parent for the shape and check seperate for object and children. Or attach the two objects to one mesh and check seperate for object elements.
The second way, not really creating one pflow source but..., you can create your second pflow source then copy and paste instance all the shared operators from the first source. The only unique ones would be the shape ops.
So I need the confetti particles to bounce off the outsides of the box as it’s opening, the trophy, and then fall to the ground like the snow does in the preset. And the box will be open then, so particles have to settle on the inner sides of the box, and also the trophy. I added another collision test for the box parts and the trophy and added Udeflectors for each part of the box and added them to that collision test. So far it doesn’t work, any advice is greatly appreciated.
So they need to bounce off any collision once then settle on whatever next collision they have? If that’s the case, going off your current setup, copy the two collision tests from Event 01 and regular paste them into Event 02. Keep the ones in Event 01 set to bounce and make the ones in Event 02 set to stop. And wire the output of both tests to Event 02.
Copy the Force from Event 01 and paste instance it into Event 02 and move it above the collision tests. If it’s under them, your particles will still be affected by the force after they stopped so they’ll continue to fall.
I also need to make the particles and box disappear soon after. No problem doing that with the geo, but how to make the particles fade out escapes me. I applied a Material Frequency to both flows and used that to make separate colors. I tried keying the opacity in the materials but the particles don’t seem to respect that.
You need to use the particle age map for the opacity in your materials. You’ll probably have to swap colors #1 & #3 so #1 is white and #3 is black, otherwise they’ll fade in not out. And make color #2 white as well and change it’s % to something like 90 or 95. Using this map won’t do anything unless you specify the age of the particles, so you need to add a delete operator. Put that up in the PFS_Snow under the render op and change it to by particle age and set the life span to whatever you want.
Since this way is based off particle age, they won’t fade out at the same time. To get them to do that, you’d have to take the Birth from Event 01 and move it into a seperate event and change the emit start and emit stop so they are both -10. Now put an age test after the birth op and set test value to 32 and variation 32. Then wire that output to Event 01 and make sure to re-wire the output from PFS_Snow to the new birth event and not Event 01. This makes all the particles born at the same time, so they will die (fade out) at the same time.
Another thing is move the Material Frequency from Event 01 to PFS_Snow under the render op as well and delete the Material Frequency from Event 02. This will apply the same material to all the events and keep the material id’s consistent.
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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