I don’t know how many times this has stumped me but I’m getting tired of trying to figure this out. All I want to do is have my object emit “perpendicular” to the surface (like needles on a cactus) but I just can’t find anything on how to do this. I am using a particle system (emitter) with a tube like object. It seems like Blender should make objects “perpendicular” as a default instead of hiding it so well. 
Please explain.
bumping this.
When you add a cylinder just give it a RX90 (applying rotation of course) before using it in a particle system.
It’s all about rotation rotation rotation.
There is nothing that a double-double can’t fix :).
OK, thank you both. Will make a note for this for future and will give that a try and see how it works.
Bumping this, the proposed solutions haven’t worked for me, and I supposed there must be a feature to set particles “normal” to the surface.
Do you use hair particles? With this it definitely works. If not, please post a blend file.
I believe for ‘emitter’ you can’t control orientation in that way. No surprise, as they are not attached to the mesh.
Correction, for emitter it works, too, to get particles oriented along surface normals, You have to do for the particle system:
Thank you - this worked.
Your steps did not work for me. I’ve modeled spikey ice crystals all facing upward, emitting from a icosphere and they are all laying down. I have object rotation on and Rotation orientation is Normal.
Is you mesh a plane, so the crystal particles are supposed to face up, or is it a curved mesh, and the particle orientation is not affected by the curvature?
If it is the former, maybe there is just an offset in the rotation, which you have to correct? Maybe doing ‘apply rotation’ helps. If not , try all 90-deg rotations for the crystals until it matches.
If it is the latter, can I see the blend file?
Emitting from a plane or sphere resulted in the same sideways particles no matter the tweaks I did in the emitter settings. I had to rotate all of m particles 90 degrees in one direction for them to come out right. Frankly that is really lame and a problem Blenders should really fix. If there were a rot offset option for all particles that would fix it and be very helpful. I also made an O’neil cylinder with same problem I had to rotate all my buildings sideways for them to come out upward on the inside of the cylinder. Not cool!
Yeah, sometimes things are confusing concerning rotation.
What I never really figured out is the curve deform modifier, which rotation and offsets it expects to do what one wants.
Hello, I am trying to make a particle system perpendicular to my object emitter. I follow the steps in the previous post. But it doesn’t work for me… do you know why? thank you all for your time!
