Splitting a Bezier Curve and Particles Follow?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Greetings Everyone,

I am new to Blender just trying to learn the nuts and bolts. I searched for a similar topic and didn’t really find anything…maybe I just phrased it with the wrong keywords.

I have a Particle Emitter following a Curve Guide made with a Bezier Curve, like a Tornado. I am wondering if there’s a way to split the Bezier Curve off in two different directions and have the Particles follow the split with half going one way and the other half going the other? Just think of the letter “Y”.

If not, then any suggestions on how to make that “split” happen with the Particles following along would be great.

Thank you in advance.

2

I can’t think of a way to ‘split’ the emitter, but you shouldn’t need to. Simply have a second emitter on the branching curve. In the particle parameters you can set a starting frame for the particle emission, so just set that to the frame where the first emitter hits the branch.

HTH

EDIT:

I threw an example together for you. I thought about it and actually left the two emitters using the same particle system rather than having the second one start at the split. This seems to be logical, since after the split each path should emit half the particles as when they were coincident.

Here’s the blend: www.skwerm.com/blender/ParticleSplit.blend

3

Thanks a bunch. That’s a really good idea just to layer and duplicate the emitter and path at the beginning and then split them off in different directions. I couldn’t get your example “.blend” file to open…it just took me to an “Error 404: Page doesn’t exist”, but I get what you’re saying. I’ll try it out.

Any other suggestions on how to split one particle path into two paths, but use just one particle emitter?

4

The link is wrong, but the file is there is you type in the URL directly.

Essentially that is the way. You may want to delay the visibility of the second particle system until the first one passes the split point.

5

Hello again,

The example from you Skwerm is what I’m looking to do, except keep the emitter put and just have the particles follow the curve guide up.

I created two separate emitters with two Bezier Curve guide paths, but the particles now instead of following each path separately going different directions, seem to “meet in the middle” of the two paths. I tried Parenting the emitter and curve, but that didn’t work. I looked at the constraints as well to the best of my somewhat limited knowledge of Blender.

6

Curve guides are layer based. Try moving one of the emitter/curve sets to another layer. So you would have an emitter and a curve on one layer, then another emitter and another curve on another layer. That should cause the particles from one emitter to only see the curve on that same layer. You can, of course, render both layer for the final effect.

7

Well, good grief… I overlooked something so simple as that. I even mentioned in my previous post that I was going to create another layer for the second emitter. Thanks, Atom!!