Hi there,
is there a way to make the kernels fall off from the bottom to the top in horizontal rings? I did not use the particle system that much and dont know.
If this could work a upwards spiral would be even cooler 
Hi, you can try textures but the easiest way is just using faces / vertices index… see example with a cylinder, I sorted faces from cursor position. The trouble is I could not get particles to fit exactly on faces -that strange empty strip there- It works fine on vertices but those can’t be sorted from a menu. So either create a mesh with good vertices order or find the problem with particles on faces…
edit: found a simple way to do a tube with sorted vertices through converting a bezier… updated link
how did you sort the Bezier ? I tried to rebuild it but did not get the same result.
I created a spiral bezier and meshed it and then applied your vertices particle system.
The vertex rotation seems to be an issue as in your example the normals are rotated
and thus are the particle objects rotated.
Interestingly the particle system has no real rotation option to overwrite this.
It confuses me that the surface emitter option does not produce equal instances as visible
in the image here. Shouldn’t there normally only be one object per face?
Gave it a look and found my mistake with first example, just set number of particles/face to 1…! That will fix the distribution problem in your pic.
the particle system setting are very simple, no need to append mine:
- number of particles = number of faces
- emit from Faces
- Particles/Face = 1
- uncheck Random and Even Distribution
- check Render > Unborn
- render object > your dupli object
then tweak to your needs…
In the vertices example I just added a bezier circle, set preview_U to 3 and then duplicated and moved up in edit mode. Then convert to mesh and use same particle setting as above but emitting from vertices.