Re: Question about Working With Particles

Heya,

I don't often have something to contribute when it comes to Blender
questions, as I have had limited experience with Blender myself
(Discovering Blender - http://www.thebest3d.com/pdp/tutorials/blender
for example). 
But you're talking about particles, so that raised the level of
interest. Not that I know how to do particles in Blender,
unfortunately, but perhaps this will interest you, so at the risk of
being slightly OT:

free seminar at 3 pm today Mountain time (1 pm Pacific time) hosted by
KurvStudios, on Project Dogwaffle Professional, including some
examples on painting with particle brushes.

If you want to check if this relates to what you're trying to do:
http://www.thebest3d.com/pdpro/tutorials/funwithparticles

We'll also talk about using the alpha channel along the particle
trails to automatically create a mask, and use the created pictures on
billboard polygons with transparency outside of the selection mask.

We'll also cover some of the more advanced animation features and uses
for compositing videos against bluescreen, animated displacement
mapping for turbulence simulation and more fun stuff possible with
version 4.1


There's also a freeware version of Dogwaffle,
http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/free


For details on these seminars check http://kurvstudios.webex.com  
attendance is limited to 30 at this time.


Hope to 'se' you there, Happy New Year, and Happy rendering and painting!




--- In [email protected], Larry Wilson <jasad_68@...> wrote:
>
> This is my first post, so please be gentle :)
> 
> I have finally started to get deeper into working with Blender 2.45,
and 
> today I decided to check out particles. I created an isosphere object 
> and just gave it the default values, with the exception of giving it a 
> -1.0 velocity in Z (I wish I had the screenshot to show you; I'll
upload 
> it later.)
> 
> I then made a ground plane that the particles would bounce off of when 
> they hit it, and I also made it so that it could detect a softbody (I 
> couldn't find any way to make it a "hard" body object--no, seriously!). 
> What ended up happening was that the particles actually came out of the 
> sphere's left side. It actually looked like what you'd get if you
turned 
> a spinning sprinkler on its side.
> 
> Now, this is a cool effect, but not what I was looking for. What I want 
> to do is have the particles fall towards the floor and bounce off of
the 
> ground plane. What I want to do eventually is have it be like a rocket 
> thruster that generates huge clouds of smoke before it finally shoots 
> into the air.
>