Hi everyone. I have a scene with a bunch of particles with animated instanced geometry on them. I instanced several copies of the geometry and had the cycle setting in the Instancer tab set to sequential, and used a creation expression to get them to randomly start at a different pose so they that don't all look alike.

My problem now is that whenever I rewind the animation, they all start at a different pose than the last playback. How do I get them to get a randomly applied start pose once, and then keep that pose in subsequent playbacks? I'm thinking the SEED function but I may be doing something wrong as it isn't working for little ol me.

Also, just out of random curiosity, is there a way to get MAYA to pick a random number from a set of choices you provide? I mean instead of saying "select a random number between 1 and 20, (rand (1, 20)), can you tell MAYA select one number from 5, 7, 12, and 35? So MAYA will only choose between those 4 numbers?