Hi all,
I have created a particle system and set the particle type to “object”, the object that I’ve used is animated with shape keys, when baking the simulation all the particles (the objects) are animated at the same time,
the question is: How to get the object’s animation start at the particle birth time ?
I’ve joined a simple file illustrating the problem, thanks
particles_shapekeys.blend (314 KB)
Blender can not do that yet. You have to create a new emitter and have a slightly offset animated copy for each emitter. That is the closest I have come.
thanks atom,
maybe we can request this feature for the upcoming 2.5 
anyway this is the effect that I wanted to achieve:
what do you think?
Wow, very nice effect ! Congratulations !
sadly the video is not my work, it’s done with 3dsmax/pflow by a freind of mine
and I wanted to do the same effect with blender,
it simple, first we animate a single flower with shape keys, and assign it to a particle system; but the problem in blender is that all the flowers will be animated at the same time,
and the desired effect require that the animation of the flowers will start relatively to the birth time of each particle.
hope to see this litle and effecient feature on the next release of blender !