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Particle emission velocity relative to object?


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Hi - i have an animated tube emitting particles. I'd like them to emit outward and upward relative to the tube. When I add velocity to the velocity channels it adjusts their velocity relative to worldspace, rather than the local tube's "x" direction.

 

How can do this thing?

 

 

thanks!

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Yes i think so.  To simply include the vectors / normals of the cylinder you have to type a ridiculous custom chunk of code. I would expect VEX like that for more complex tasks, but that seems a rather basic one, right?

 

Also I'm relatively new to it - so I'm sure you're right that it's getting better.  But over the last two years I've seen it change so dramatically it's hard to keep up!

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3 lines of simple vex code seems reasonable to me. That's less than you'd use in an equivalent maya particle expression, and much more performant. I broke it up across a few lines to add more control, and make it easier to read. Keep in mind that it'll work on any kind of geo, static or deforming, and always give you a velocity that's combed to point along the y axis. A few lines of code to do that doesn't seem ridiculous at all.

 

If you literally only need v to point along the axis of the cylinder, and no other purpose, then yeah, of course there's simpler ways to do that. Immediately after you create your cylinder, put down an attribute create sop with the following settings:

 

  • name:v
  • type: vector
  • value: 0 4 0

When you do your transforms and whatnot after the attrib create, v will always point down the length of the cylinder.

 

Another way would be to use a polyframe node to give you N, tangentu, tangentv, then copy tangentu (or tangentv) into v. Many ways to skin many cats in Houdini.

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I guess I'm just frustrated at trying to get up to speed on a convoluted program with shitty outdated docs, which requires code rather often...

 

But you do have a point there. And thanks for the code - i'll have it forever now!  

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