In the long run, I’m trying to make a comic book style space ship (something like what you’d see in the 1930s American comics like Flash Gordon) with rockets with flames coming out of them. I’m having trouble with creating the fire because particles are handled so differently in 2.42 than in the 2.3 book that I have. I can create particles, animate the scene, and use ALT-A to test animate them. I’m not getting the effects I expect in terms of controlling them.
I understand that the new way to do it is not with a lattice but with a mesh. I’ve seen references to an empty mesh and see I can add an Empty from the menu, but I can’t find instructions in the Wiki on what an Empty is and what I can do with it. (I’m finding it hard to actually look up things in the Wiki. I checked the glossary for Empty and found a brief description, but no links or info on just what I can do with one.) When I added an Empty to my scene, I go an X and Y axis drawn on my scene, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
Right now the only way I can understand to control particles is to use another mesh and set the deflection. I created an icosphere to use as an emitter and created a cone around it, as if it were the cone on a rocket engine, where one would see the flame shooting out. The sphere emitted from all angles and I set the cone to deflect particles. I set the dampening for both hard and soft bodies at 1, which is the highest setting and a setting one would expect would not let any particles pass through, but I still find a LOT of particles pass through this cone.
For now, the big question is how do I control particles after they’ve left an emitter? This is on 2.42, so I could not get a lattice to control the particles. A smaller question is how do I use an Empty? From what I understand it’s a mesh that is not rendered, which I’d like to be able to do since it seems a lattice can’t control particles any more.
select your empty - in the feilds and deflection tab make it a deflector (sphere or vortex or whatever) - and turn the stregnth up
also make sure it’s on the same layer as the particles - now it should effect your particles
play around with it to get them to do what you want
But how do I shape an empty? All I get when I add an empty is an axis indicator - no vertices or anything else. I can’t find anything in the Wiki that tells me how to create a shape with an empty.
Thanks for the links. I have looked over the one on hair, which is quite interesting. I experimented with a curve and found that if I put the curve around the emitter and shaped it (the curve) like a cone, the particles followed the shape of the curve instead of the curve containing the particles.
I also noticed the page with tutorial links has a helpful notation of which ones are before 2.4. That’s a HUGE help, since the links from the main Wiki page don’t indicate that. I had read how to control particles with a lattice and am disappointed that it seems impossible to do something like that now. I’ve tried making a mesh and making it non-permeable, but that doesn’t work. I see the example at the bottom of this page:
with the particles looking like liquid and bouncing off a mesh, but whatever I do to the settings on a mesh I make, particles go straight through it.
I noticed all the flames on the page you linked to are open. I’m trying to have mine in a cone in a rocket engine and whenever I do that, as I indicated above, particles go through it instead of bouncing off it.