Duplivert Particles and animated textures

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’ve been trying to come up with a nice particle system and though of achieving something similar I saw in Combustion3 a friend was showing me the other day. Esentially it’s based on a composition of small sprite animations. I planned to do following:

  • Create a small, around 15 frames, animation of something similar to an explosion. Used gimp’s GAP for that (see below). Maybe the particle system in blender might have been a better choice even.
  • created a mesh plane, and rotated it 360 degrees in about 30 frames, extrapolated
  • created a subdivided plane mesh as a particle system, moved it along path
  • parented the rotating plane to the particle system using dupliverts
  • I expected using an animated texture on the rotating plane will create a material that will be applied to individual particles.

http://jimmac.musichall.cz/stuff/single-particle.gif

Unfortunately I’m kinda stuck in a dead end, because the material is appllied globally, and doesn’t take the particle life in account as it would it if was a material of the particle system. However using a texture on the particle system doesn’t seem to make sense in this case.

Is the whole concept unimplementable? Thanks for any hints to get me back on track.

Here’s the blend file to illustrate.

2

i think what you want is not possible right now. blender can map since 232 motion IPO’s to the particle life, but obviously no material IPO’s. so you can animate an particle’s size during it’s local lifetime (even that wasn’t possible before), but color changes are still handled globally without respect to a particle’s local time.

i hope that the particle system will be rewritten or at least some python scripts will be available for more complex particle animations.

greets

marin