I 'm not sure which forum to put this in, but I suppose animation is the most applicable.
I’m having some “issues” controlling the particle system, mostly around deflection and repeating.
the particle collision engine seems really… odd. Using -z force (gravity) I’m pulling the particles into a ground plane. They slow down before reaching it, regardless of the damping setting (I am using recalculate system every time I change something, so I don’t think that’s it). Before reaching the surface, they bounce, and as gravity pulls them down again, they repeat on a smaller scale (they slow down less, and get closer to the plane). Eventually they reach the plane and stop. Is there some kind of setting I’m missing, or is the particle collision in dire need of fixing? (not that I’m unimpressed with how far Blender has gone, I just think there’s room for improvement)
After using bullet in the GE, which is optimized to run in real time, I expected a physics engine that can take as long as it needs to do one frame to be more accurate, not less.
Also, is there some way to make a particle system fire multiple times with pauses in between? (example- a rocket flies, cuts it’s engine for a second, then starts it up again) I can’t use the time IPO because then all the smoke that should be hanging in the air form the first round of firing would go away, and I’d rather not use multiple emitters, because if I wanted to make, say, a sputtering rocket, I would need five or six per second of animation. Keeping track of that many, never mind changing them if I want to make the smoke denser or shift everything in time would be a huge pain. All the search results I got while looking for this were early 2006 or before, I was wondering if anything new happened to allow this sort of control.
whoo, that was a lot of typing. I hope I made sense/am not being a dumbass.