I have tried almost everything (scaling up the render size of metaballs, scaling up the actual size, deleted adn redid the emitter and the metaball, started a new empty project, baked, deleted any parent and/or animation, applied scale and transforms)
IMPORTANT
The only thing that changes the issue is when I make the lifetime close to 20. I don’t want to do that though, I need them to live until the end of the animation. But even then it dissapears (turns to 0 size) for a few frames randomly. There are no animations, this is a clean new project as you can see.
All ten particle emissions have the exact same parameters apart from start time/stop time/lifetime
It’s been a week, I can’t get past this issue, please save me
The project is available for download if anybody needs it for testing
I took a look at it and the only conclusion I can come to is that Blender can’t seem to handle that many metaballs at the same time which would make sense considering how heavy it is to compute and re-compute all the distance fields for thousands of metaballs.
So the scale getting set to 0 after a certain amount has been spawned is probably just Blender saying “you know what, nope I don’t want to do this and you probably don’t actually either”
Probably best to just make a fluid simulation instead and save yourself the headache
Thanks for your time! Someone else messaged me and said that something might get messed up because I duplicated the same particle system multiple times, so I will try to create them from scratch without duplicating each one. Then I will reduce particle amounts to test your theory and if this doesn’t work I will scrap the project and study different fluid simulation techniques. Thanks again, I will update the post if I solve it.
I tried setting up individual particle systems on separate objects each using a separate metaball as the instance object but the result was still the same.
I also tried running a single particle system with 10000 as emission over the whole timeline and the same result happened after about 2400 spawned metaballs
Fluid simulation is the way, you can control the emission in a similar way to the particle system with initial velocities and so on so it shouldn’t be too big of a learning curve
