I was doing one of the basic tutorials for Max 2012 - the catapult breaking a castle wall with MassFX. Of course i got way ahead of my actual 3d knowledge, thinking it would be cool to create dust/smoke where the projectile hits and dust from the falling bricks.

I’m getting the feeling that the short answer is: you can’t do it with just the basic PFlow with the learning edition, but here goes:

if I have it right, the basic PFlow seems to require a separate deflector for each piece of geometry that you want to emit particles (i.e. each brick or fragment trailing dust as it falls)

I’m trying to scale back to a really simple scene to see what I can accomplish but am not having much luck. I do know that four pieces of geometry hitting one deflector in a scene works, but I’m trying to get fragments trailing particles on collision in addition to creating particles when impacting the ground. Maybe too complex too early (I’m coming back to Max after a few years of slacking off working with it), but my curiosity is aroused and I really feel like this should be do-able.

Say I have 4 bricks that get hit by a ball then go flying. Would I need a separate deflector for each brick AND the ball for them to emit particles upon collision with each other, and another ground deflector for emitting particles from the pieces when they land.

I’ve been trying to reverse engineer/understand Pflow from a collection of presets, but if anyone has a pointer in the right direction I’d appreciate it.

smtfx 19 January 2012 09:34 PM

I’m getting the feeling that the short answer is: you can’t do it with just the basic PFlow with the learning edition

Well you shouldn’t have any limitations on pflow with the trial version or educational version. And pflow is quite powerful and can accomplish pretty much anything you can think of if you know what to do.

if I have it right, the basic PFlow seems to require a separate deflector for each piece of geometry that you want to emit particles (i.e. each brick or fragment trailing dust as it falls)

Say I have 4 bricks that get hit by a ball then go flying. Would I need a separate deflector for each brick AND the ball for them to emit particles upon collision with each other, and another ground deflector for emitting particles from the pieces when they land.

I couldn’t find any tutorial for a catapult, so I’m not sure what you’re doing. But if you’re using Mass FX and pflow, I’d create keys for the Mass FX animation first. Then you can use those animated objects in your pflow. You can group the individual bricks and use them in a udeflector and use a regular deflector for the ground.

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

This looks ugly, but it’s starting to go the way I imagined

	Video

Not bad. You just need to add in some stuff like gravity and maybe collisions with the ground if it’s supposed to be small bits of rock. For smoke you don’t really need to.

Another thing you could do is select all your bricks and add a poly select modifier. Then you can select the polys at the cracks and in your position object op, set the location to selected faces instead of surface. That will make the particles only come from the cracks.

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