turbulence
 

I'm trying to make a particle system that deforms like ocean water but with instanced objects. I made a plane of particles, and I'm trying to use turbulence on them, but I can't seem to control the turbulence. Anyone know how to just affect the Y axis? I've tried setting 2 of the 3 phase values to 0 (X & Z, X & Y, and Y & Z), and in each case the particles move in all 3 axis.

Another option is to write MEL that will cause the particles to undulate, but so far I haven't figured out how to do that either.

Thanks for the help.
-dann

Tip/trick:

I havn't tried this, but if you break out one of Maya's default canned ocean example fluids, they come with a HEIGHTFIELD NODE.

This node effects a nurbs plane (that does NOT render btw) to give you a pseudo-preview what your ocean waves will look like before rendertime.

But what if you selected that plane, and tweaked the ocean shader/texture to wave and peak like you want,
THEN:

make the ocean not visible
then make the nurbs surface a surface emitter, but make the emitted particles have an attenuation setting so that they just spawn, then stop moving outwards.

So, then, in theory, they will just "ride the waves" and depending on how dense your instances are, it could very much look like the animation you are looking for:)

Good luck, and lemme know if that works:)


PS, I think you can do this also without the oceam fluid too.
Just do a doc search on usage of the heightfield node with a nurbs plane so that you can try this with a lighter scene:)

Rage,

I thought of that, but I don't have fluids at work. However, My next thought was just to make a plane, give it a lattice, make some clusters, and animate it deforming. The thing is, my particles don't seem to care about the deformation. I've tried making my plane a surface emitter, and a directional emitter, but neither of them work. The particles ignore the plane's deformations once emitted. I've tried tweaking the weight, conserve, inherit, and emmision in world settings, but to no avail.

How do you make them "ride the waves"?

Thanks.

Well, without the Heightfield node trick, you could also try:

Download and use the Noise turbulence melscript from Highend,
or the channel-noise mel from Dirk Baluch's site on your nurbs plane geometry to get a pseudo-wave look.

You could also try using blend-shapes to get your wavy look by using the Paint tool to deform your geometry, then making that a blendshape for other tweaks over time and key the changes to get your wavy geometry.

Or, similarly, you could just use the Paint tool and just key your vertice positions over time.


Then, make the surface LIVE. (check the docs regarding that)

Then "Paint" particles onto your LIVE geometry, then do your instancing etc.
and they "should" then follow the deforming geometry.

Lemme know if any of that helped:)