Self image for particle

Hey guys. My name is JustAnotherPlay (Should’ve been JustAnotherPlayer but it’s now enough XD). So enough with the introduction.

You see, I’m pretty new at creating Particles. So I thought “Why not?”. And so I created one. But I want to make the particle with my own image (which is a leaf) but there’s no option whatsoever to input it.

Can anyone help?

If you guys are wondering what particle I want, it’s a few leafs getting pushed by the wind.

Use an object as particle. A simple plane will do for a leaf.


Use your texture in the material for the plane… and let the wind blow. :wink:

Just keep in mind that planes have 2 sides. :eyebrowlift:

To add some variety in the leaves, prepare several of them, group them and select “Group” instead of “Object”.

Hey thanks dude. But I want the leafs to be randomly rotated (meaning one is rotated on Y and the other is rotated on Z) and I want them to be blowing sideways. Anyway to do that?

Sure… You can do pretty much anything with the particles. In the beginning, my leaves were flying close to the floor like cars on a highway. :smiley: I just added some random rotation in the emitter and a turbulence force field on the path of the wind.

Now, for what you want, use a wind force field. Disable the Gravity and set the Normal to zero, i.e. no velocity at emission time. Set the wind in a corner of the scene, point it in the right direction. [ALT A] to start the particles and all you have to do is to tune the speed of the wind. (By default the wind is a constant force across the whole scene.) It just works.


Quick and ugly example. (I made the particles really big to see them better… but we can also see better how they cross each other.)

Which leads me to your question about the rotation. What I understood is that you want to have particles crossing at 90°… but since that doesn’t make sense to me, let’s say that I didn’t understand. Still, there’s nothing impossible… and there are workarounds for what’s impossible. :wink:

In case you want to play with what I did, here is the blend file:

Forum Leaves+Wind.blend (1010 KB)

(The materials are for Cycles but the particle systems are neutral.)