Using collection instance as particle?

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

I need to populate a crowd scene. I get how to use a hair particle system with "render as collection. I’ve been able to get a plane covered with non-overlapping randomly chosen meshes from a collection I chose. Great.

Here’s the problem: I have characters ready to go, but they are not a single mesh. My life would be a lot easier if I could make a collection of instances of the whole characters, and then have the particle system use those instances to display the particles. Alas, putting collection instances in the particle system’s chosen collection results in blank particles.

Is there a way to do this, or will I just have to make versions of my character models that are a single mesh for each character?

Does this make sense? Not totally sure if I’m explaining it properly. I can provide screenshots if that would help.

Thanks for taking the time to read this weird question.

1 Like
2

In the particle panel, where you choose the source, is checkmark for using the whole collection. It’s name is, “Whole Collection”.
That ought to get you what you want.

3

Not quite the solution for this case, unfortunately. I could use that if it was all instances of the same character. That’ll give me the entire collection containing all of the characters. Or if I choose a single character’s collection, then I just get duplicates of that single character.

The thing I need is for it to randomly select a character for each particle. If it would let me use collection instances this would be easy, but that appears not to be an option.

Characters_Collection
        |
        |___________Character_A
        |               |--- mesh
        |               |--- mesh
        |               |--- mesh
        |
        | 
        |___________Character_B
                       |--- mesh
                       |--- mesh
                       |--- mesh

Using Characters_Collection as the instance collection gets me a mess of copies of the various meshes that make up each character, but not together.

Selecting “Whole Collection” with Characters_Collection makes each particle be a copy of all of the characters mooshed together.
Selecting Character_A or Character_B gets me only instances of that single character.

What I tried to do was to make:

Particles_Collection
         |
         |___Character_A_collection_Instance
         |
         |___Character_A_collection_Instance

…and tell the particle system to use Particles_Collection as its instance collection, but the collection instances don’t show up as anything, as far as I can tell.

Basically, all I’m looking for is a way to get particles, each of which is a randomly selected whole character.

My fallback is to just make a single unified mesh of each character, put them in a collection, and use that as the instance collection, but that seems inelegant and will take some doing.

4

Ya, my understanding is that it would be one full object in the collection.
Give that a shot. Other than that, I am watching to see what your solution ends up being.
Robert