particle emitter duration

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello everyone.

I am just coming to grips with the particle system in Blender and it is not behaving the way I expect it to.

My goal is to have an emitter slowly emitting particles at a roughly constant rate for about 3-5 minutes (i.e. a rain-style background effect).

Here is my understanding of particles:

  • You set the duration for which particles will be emitted. Call this time T seconds, obviously expressed as a frame interval (i.e. frame a till frame b).

  • You set the number of particles to be emittted total (call it N)

  • Particles should be emitted at a rate of N / T particles per second for the duration you have told the emitter to emmit, and then should suddenly stop being emitted.

Is this correct ?

In my scene, the emitter is blowing all of its particles in about 1/5 the alotted time then not producing any more. I can turn up the number of particles so they last longer but this obviously ruins the effect.

I have tried to set up overlapping emitters just to get a steady stream but these are not starting at the frame they are supposed to.

Is there some quirk / bug I should know about or do I just have it all wrong ?

Thanks a lot in advance for any help as this is really starting to drive me nuts.

2

What life have you set for your particles? 3 - 5 minutes at a normal rate is between about 4000 and 7000 frames depending in camera speed.

Are you satting the end for about this?

3

Yeah, I know exactly how long the animation runs for in frames and have set the particle end to be that value.

I have a feeling it is a bug that only manifests itself in certain circumstances because I’ve recently recreated the particle emitters from scratch and they seem to be behaving nicely now.

Cheers for the reply.