Particles along a curve - constraint Z orientation

[splegare]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to do a school of fish with a particle system that would follow a curve. Basically I'm emitting some particles and they move along a curve with a popcurveforce.

By default the particles orientation seem to go along with the curve but since I'm trying to do a school of fish, I would like my particles Z orientation to always be 0 so the fishes don't swim on the back.

So far I've tried with this expression in a popwrangle : p@orient.z = 0; 

The thing is it seems to zero out the orientation of x and y as well.. And I still want the x and y to go along with the curve. I'v tried with a popattract instead of a popcurveforce and I'm still not able to constraint the Z orient.. 

Maybe it has to do with something else than the @orient attribute since I don't see it in my geometry spreadsheet..? There's something I don't get! (Needless to say that I'm new in Houdini :P)

Thanks a lot!

test_fish_school.hiplc

[splegare]

If it can help anyone, I finally ended up switching strategy. Instead of using a popcurveforce, I went back to my first thought of animating a sphere along a spline and use it as a goal object in a popattract. 

In order to fix my issue with the z orientation, I kind of overrode the particles orientation with the lookat() function so each particle is now aiming at their goal without disturbing their local z-axis..

Here is what I've put in my popwrangle:

matrix3 m = lookat(v@force, {0,0,0});
p@orient = quaternion(m);

I have attached a quicktime if you want to have a look. 

Cheers!

fish_school_v01.mp4

Edited May 13, 2017 by splegare

[Atom]

Looks nice, thanks for the solution. I took a look at your file and could not figure it out.

 

[xc278260759]

Very good plan。