Hey guys! I just thought I’d share this new project I’ve been working on recently. I’ve always wanted to have a lightsaber interact (semi-)realistically with an environment, so I decided to combine modeling, physics simulation, dynamic paint, and particles into a cool-looking animation. I figured it’d be a fun exercise, and it hasn’t disappointed, but I’ve hit a snag. Before I get into that, here’s what I’ve got so far:
As you can see, I’ve got dynamic paint driving 2 different displacements, as well as a texture mask for the melty parts and a separate texture mask for the glow that fades out dynamically. All that’s left is the sparks. When I began this project, I figured it’d be a simple task to have dynamic paint emit the sparks using simple vertex weight mode. Failing that, I thought surely baking to an animated image sequence would do the trick, right? Well, wrong. Neither of those things worked at all. The closest I got was with the image sequence, but even that only emitted all the particles from a single gash, and not when it was supposed to.
Does anybody here know how to make a point of interaction between two meshes emit particles dynamically? I’d like to avoid getting in there with an emitter and manually animating it along the points of contact. Thanks in advance for any feedback, criticism, or advice!