Hi everybody,

1.
I thought to remember, that it was possible to duplicate the time node and reconnect the copied node to e.g. a particle-object.

I´ve created particles and cashed them. In the hypergraph “show up and downstream-connections”, then select the “time1” node, Ctrl+d the node ... at this point maya is nagging: error: “no Objects to duplicate”
What´s wrong?
Or can I create a new timeNode?

2.
The Particle-Object´s rendertype is blobby surface, livespan set to 2, I´ve created a colPP-Attribute and connected a ramp to it. In the viewport I can see the particles are red if they are born and blue if they die - all is fine. But when I render it with software and mentalray it doesnt work.
Here I also thhink, that it worked in earlier versions, or I´m stupid? How can I solve this?

Thanks for help

le_horge

1. Already answered elsewhere. Thanks for crossposting.

2. Particle cloud shaders do this using their life color attribute, but they’re not suitable for blobby renders. Solution is assign a shader (like a lambert) to the blobby particles and map a ramp to the color, use a particleSampler node to drive the uvCoord of the ramp.