Scripting particles

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

Hi guys,

I have some serious problems with setting up a particle system, which is driving me mad.

I would like to setup a rather complex path for some particles.
Particularly I would like to have a particle system which distributes it’s particles among a dozen of curve guides, so that in the end all animated particles move along a 3d surface to create a ghostly 3d object of glowing particles.

I could not find out how to tell the particle system to let some of the particles follow one Curve Guide, while some other particles have to follow another Curve Guide.
Also I have tried to use multiple particle systems, but could not find out how to tell one particle system only to follow one special curve guide, while the next particle system follows another curve guide.

Since blender supports an in-memory-particle cache with the possibility to “comb” the particle pathes, now I hope I can
use python to script the particles with a mathematical function (or finally let them follow an array of curves manually).

While iterating over all of the particles in my particle system, I can access the location of all particles.
Also, blender does not complain when I change their positions - but in the end blender does adopt the changes to the particle positions.

Here is a code snipped I am using:


particleObject = bpy.data.objects['Particles']
particleSystem = bpy.context.object.particle_systems['ParticleSystem']
particles = particleSystem.particles

bpy.context.scene.objects.active = particleObject

startFrame = bpy.context.scene.frame_start
endFrame = bpy.context.scene.frame_end

for frame in range(startFrame, endFrame):
    for p in particles.values():
        bpy.context.scene.frame_current = frame
        p.location=(sin(frame), cos(frame), frame) # This is just a simple example to test the approach

I would appreciate any tip you can give me to get the particles tamed :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for any help
-Tarion-

2

You can have the particles follow different CurveGuides if you put the CurveGuide force fields on separate layers along with the according particle systems.

3

It is not possible to assign values to particles. All you can do is “poll” their values. You can make an object for each particle then script where they are located. This was my approach in the RE:ticular AddOn.

If you just want particles along a surface you may be able to set that up using boids with the surface being a collision object and then place an un-obtainable goal in the center. They will scramble around the outside trying to get to the center.

4

Thank you guys for your quick responses.

Though it is sad, that it is not possible to script particles in a particle system, your tip with distributing the curve guides and particle systems to different layers works like a charm.

So again - thank you for your help
-Tarion-