Maya Particles.. My thoughts. 2005-05-05 - By Eric Lampi
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Well half of my problem at the moment is navigating in
Maya! Maddening to say the least.
I've done a few things lately that I want to write
some tutorials for, one of these days I'll get to it.
You can do an awful lot with XSI using deformers, and
some things I managed to figure out have to do with
attaching particles to moving geometry and then
releasing them on command. It's pretty straight
forward, and not entirely perfect, not that I had time
to perfect it, but it's better than nothing.
Michael Isner stopped by Psyop the other day, and he
was writing down everyones suggestions on different
topics. One of the ideas I mentioned was making forces
so that they display sort of like a box of vector
pins. So you can see the direction and strength and
falloff of the force. In terms of the forces, One of
the examples I sited were ocean maps that have little
arrows that show the currents. Apparently it's not
such an original idea since that's exactly what I saw
5 minutes ago when someone was using fluid effects as
a force on particles.
I was impressed, then he blew me away by showing me
how he can define direction and speed vectors with
brush strokes... So F-ing cool! That's a really
powerful feature, and I know XSI has all the nuts and
bolts to make that happen.
Expressions are useful, but I was really surprised
that something as commonly used as a variance function
has to be manually added. It does seem to be wide
open for a lot of possibilities, linking different
properties together, driving one attribute with
another. Problem for me is, at the moment I have 3
people who can nudge me along to figure it out with
Maya, but in XSI, I have no clue. :)
Some basic plug in examples of how to script particles
in the same manner would be great if someone had the
time to make a short "Scripting XSI particles for
Dummies" web page would be nice :).
EE
Freelance 3-D Animator, F/X Artist, Particle Man
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