I was playing around with the particle system. I wanted to do a matrix style freeze time effect.
So I have some particles in motion.
Then I add a Time IPO to the emitter object.
Sure enough, I can stop the time of the particles, but the internal particle system still counts down the particles death. My particles have a life of only 20 frames, if I stop time for more than 20 frames, they all die out then are reborn as time ramps back up again.
Is there any way to tell the internal particle system that time has stopped?
Is there an IPO element to control the internal time of the particle system?
How do you handle this style of effect with short lifespan particles?
The attached BLEND demonstrates this what I have so far.
It seems like you can do all sorts of stuff with the Particle IPO type … You might want to switch to that IPO type and play around with some of the curves . E_Life looks promising …
You have a negative slope in your time IPO. This resets the particles, if you change the curve and avoid a negative slope it works as you would like it to be.
HTH
And no, this is not a bug in the particle system. It may be a problem with the general caching implementation though, it would be nice if you could revert the time especially for certain explosion effects.
I have looked at my Time IPO curve and it is not negative. It is shaped exactly how I want the time to proceed through my animation. It rises, hangs a bit while slowly climbing, then takes off again. Not once does it go negative. It is always sloping to the right, forward into time.
Can you explain what part of this curve is a negative slope?
