I wish to make a scene where I have a covered surface of cylindrically shaped particles packed randomly as they would with physics. Then I wish from that surface to have a character rising and being formed of these particles. I have made a paint mockup of the concept (see attachment and imagine the particles are covering more densely).
I have no idea how to go about this. I have created my cylindrical-like particle, which I then need to duplicate onto the floor and then make up the character. I was initially thinking linking the particle to a vertex group and then using weight paint, but I am not sure this will be efficient.
Any ideas? Do I need to make a low-poly character mesh first and then somehow get the particles on it like fur maybe, or can I somehow sculpt the character from a “reservoir” of parcticles?
the torus has been moved, and you can see how the particles all go to where the object was.
setup:
Cube (or any shape) with a particle system set to emition.
object (in this case the torus, in your case the cookiemonster)
go to the physics tab of the object, enable Force Field, and set flow to 10, and stength to a negative value (i took -7, but you should play around with this). also make sure Shape is set to surface.
add another object witch will be the particle, in my case i took a cylinder since thats what you wanted for your character.
go to the particle system, and under Render, set the emition to object.
under physics, set size to whatever value you want, and set random size to a high value. i took 1, but take whatever you want. just to get some variation in the size.
also set it to Boids, instead of newton.
also enable rotation, and set the random value to a high number.
keep in mind i barely EVER use physics, but i just played around with it for a few minutes now and this is what i got so far. im sure there are better alternatives out there, but i thought letting you know what i ended up with.
interesting and nice way to do it
but don’t do lot of particles system
is there like a tut on PDF may be or a video with some voice to explain what is being done
any simple file with may be suzanne would help to understand how the set up is done !
It works pretty well using the tutorial video. However, now I have the issue that the cylinders that assemble on the character model, they overlap once packed onto the model, i.e. the cylinder meshes intertwines. Is there a way to prevent the cylinders to overlap such that they stop when they touch each other?
In case you don’t need a very large amount of cylinders, and the character is not animated, maybe you could use rigid bodies and play it backwards?
I mean, you first make the charater packed with cylinders, apply rigid body to all of them, place a collider below, make them fall on the ground and then use the video editor to play the animation backwards. Or you can even bake them to keyframes and reverse the f-curves directly.
You can even use particles for this: you place them inside the character (meaning that you make them emitted by the volume), go to the modifiers stack, apply the modifier so you get a lot of little cylinder objects already placed, ant then you do the same as above.
Thanks for you suggestion TiZeta, I get the idea, but I have trouble getting this to work.
Once I have emitted my cylinders to my character, I can get all the emitted cylinders into individual objects by ctrl+shift+A. However, it will not let my apply rigid body to all of them at once, but only one at a time! And in the start frame, after manually adding active to a few particles, the meshes are still intertwined. It takes a few frames for them to become untangled, but then they are already too far from my character which is then beginning to lose its shape.
Well, for issue n.1, you can apply the rb to all objects. You do it from the 3d view, side panel (left), the physics tab, there is a “add active” button. This will make all the selected object rigid bodies at once.
For the entaglement, maybe try to lower the amount of particles and set them to “fluid?” It worked for me.
