2.49b Basic Particles

[irakrakow]

Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwsR8v5VE4M

Read the script: http://blender3dvideos.blogspot.com/2009/10/249b-particle-objects.html

Blender's particle system is flexible and powerful. It can be used for simulating effects like fire, hair, fur, rain. Particles can be emitted from any kind of mesh object. The purpose of this video is to acquaint you with the basic controls for a particle emitter in Blender 2.49b. We'll use the plane, which is the simplest to show. This should give you a good start on doing fire and rain simulations in Blender.

[Dread-Eye]

I just recently started playing with Blender (2.49) and am having some trouble with particles. I watched your Basic Particles video tutorial and noticed that Blender cycles through an object's faces, one at a time, when emitting particles. Can this cycling be changed in any way? I watched Colin Levy's tutorial on Symmetrical Particles <http://walkercreations.org/blender/particle%20tutorial.mov> and find that his version of Blender acts differently from mine. When trying to emit from vertices, I don't want to have each vertex spit out its full share of particles in a long single line before cycling to the next vertex. I would rather the cycle be per particle. Any advice?

[irakrakow]

Yes. You have quite a bit of control on how particles are emitted. Look at the Emit From: panel. Particles can be emitted from vertices, faces, or the mesh volume. They can be emitted randomly or in some sequence. The distribution can be jittered, random, or gridlike. The amount of jitter can be controlled. Also look at all the settings in the Physics tabs, including something other than Newtonian physics. The amount of control is actually initially bewildering, at least for me. It's worth a tutorial at some point down the road.

[rodabt]

Well, I think there is no intuitive way of doing this however. I tried every parameter available in the particle system but it seems impossible to generate simultaneous streams of particles from all vertices, the full stream just cycles CCW. The closer solutions I've discovered so far:

- Creating separated vertices as isolated emitters and then assigning the same particle system setting to each, which is good if you plan to have few emitters.

- Using only one mesh emitter and then setting in Emission block both start and end to 1, but then the problem is that every stream comes as a tight pack.