I’m running into problems with a particle system that is linked into a file from a library.
This is what I’m attempting to do:
- Create an animated effect including mesh animations and a particle system (it’s complex, which is why I want to do it in a separate file)
- Group these objects (in the library Blend file)
- Bake the particle system motion in the library file.
- Link the group into the user Blend file
- Playing back should play animated effects including particle motion
In some test files this works as I expect, but then in my “real” project it fails. The regular mesh animation works, but the particle system behaves strangely.
Failure modes:
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Particles sometimes don’t show up at all
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Sometimes SOME of the particles show up, or the particles are in the wrong places
-
Particles look fine in 3D viewport, but don’t render at all, or render in the wrong place (I see some cloudy effects in other parts of the image that are nowhere near the particles as indicated in the 3D viewport – I think it might be the particles, because the halo material effect is similar to what they should look like).
Some of these errors are similar to cache errors I get with the particle system if I change parameters midstream and don’t re-bake the particles (i.e. Blender is trying to update on-the-fly as I edit, but not quite doing it right).
I’ve tried to get the Particle System to show up in the user file by looking through the outliner. I can find it in the Object section as a library-linked datablock. But I can’t see anything that I can do to make it update or anything. All the settings are correct – I don’t actually need to change any of them. I just need Blender to use the data that’s there.
This is with Blender 2.68.
Am I doing something wrong? Is there a step I’m missing somewhere? Surely this can work – I mean lots of characters have particle hair, right? So this shouldn’t be that different, should it?