Hi,
Does anyone know how to animate a particle’s size over its lifetime? I am using Blender 2.55 and I can’t find the correct documentation. If someone could point me in the right direction or could explain how I would be very happy.
Thanks.
What type of particle?
Halo - object - line - path - group - billboard?
I’m currently working with billboards but I wouldn’t mind knowing how to do the same with halos. Thanks.
try this by jahka http://jahkaparticles.blogspot.com/2010/12/texture-coordinates-introduction-video.html
Set key-frames for the size value in the Physics panel. (right-click on item or just mouse on and hit “i”)
OR
Use an object for the billboard and animate the object itself.
Attachments
billboard_size.blend (62 KB)
Thank-you for the suggestion. However, this causes the particles to scale at the same time rather than each particle over its individual lifetime.
What are you trying to do? Could you use an object group with each object having it’s own animated scale?
Attachments
billboard_size_2.blend (109 KB)
It is one of the limitations of the Blender particle system. It does not honor the age of the particle.
Ideally, we want what After Effects users have in Trapcode particular. The ability to draw an envelope/curve and have the curve represent what happens to a single particle over it’s individual lifetime. Each and every particle starts at the beginning of the curve and executes the value change represented in the curve (for any given parameter i.e. rotation,scale, etc) over the life of that particle.
EXAMPLE:
Imagine a curve that scales linearly from 0-100 over 100 frames.
Particle 1 is born on frame #1 and receives a scale of 0.0.
Particle 2 is born on frame #50 and gets a scale of 0.0.
The math is that simple, but Blender 2.5 can not do that.
Jahka we need this more importantly than any of your new bells and whistles!
How can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?
I have used many particle systems in many different software packages and Blender is the only one that does not work correctly. It is a shame, because users expect this. Kind of like we expect to be able to move the mouse and select things. It has been posted about for YEARS and YEARS and no one has stepped up to the plate to make this work.
That is why I wrote the APE script. APE will correctly generate particles that are age honoured. But that is only for 2.49.
I just visited www.graphicall.org
Particles can now change their color (or any other texturable material property) by their age! (like 2.4x) Since [33540] thanks Janne (jhk)!
Ok, with news this big, I just had to give it a try. SO let’s remember how it worked in 2.49. You could use the IPO curve in the frame range of 0-100 to emulate a percentage which age was routed to. So if your particle was 50% dead, it would use frame 50 from the IPO.
I pulled down the fliciss build r33664, which is greater than the required 33540 mentioned in the quote.
I created an emitter that spits out two particles over 100 frames. So particle # 1 is born on frame #1 and particle #2 is born on frame #51.
I am using a simple plane as the object based particle. I have UV mapped the plane with a BLEND texture in sphere mode to approximate the halo effect.
I animated the texture size (X,Y and Z) from 0.0 to 1.0 across 100 frames. This means that @ frame #51 particle #1 should have a size of 0.5 and particle #2 should have a size of 0.0. But thus is not the case. The claim in the above quote does not seem to work using the work-flow I have described.
I am posting my BLEND file as a pre-setup scene so others might be able to try and verify this new feature.
Attachments
25_particle_age_via_texture.blend (525 KB)
I have only played with this new particle change briefly. As far as I can tell you can only use a linear blend texture on the emitter to change the color of halo particles over their lifetime. This is a step in the right direction, but unless I am missing something, I can’t get it to change even the color of object particles over their lifetime; so there still seems to be a way to go until particles are working correctly.
AlanK, you’re (unfortunately) right.
@Atom: The new feature only works with halo particles and the way to set up the change over particle life has been changed, watch:
Dang,
Halo is worthless… (did I say that or think that…dum-deedum).