Hi everyone,

I'm not very experienced at all in using MAYA, and I happened to want to make a fountain, and animate it. I thought that particles would be good for the water, but I don't know how I can get this to work. I figured, I'd create an emitter at the locations where the water would be spit out by the fountain. This has sort of been working, but I think the methods that I'm using for accomplishing this are not completely effective.

For example, I wanted water to be shot straight up, at the top of the fountain, but setting the emitter to directional only made a straight line of particles. So, I set it to Omni, and then I made a gravity field to affect it, and pull all the particles towards the sky. I also set the particles lifespan so that they wouldn't live too long, and just keep hurlting upwards.

I know thats not effective at all, the problem is I don't know what the basic attributes of particles I can edit. I tried the MAYA 8.5 PLE help, but it just said to edit the attributes. Great help to me, if I don't know what the attributes do... -.-

Anyways.. a couple questions are:

1) can I get particles to follow a curve?
2) How do I get the particles to look like a jet of water, instead of dots?
3) I hear there are some constraints I can use to keep the particles from spreading out too much? Can anyone elaborate?


Thanks much for any responses I get,
Bluethunder