Particles Inside Tube

[anamous]

For the life of me I haven't been able to find out how to make particles flow through a nurbs tube, from one end to the other. I don't want them on the tube's surface, i want them inside the tube. random movement while still following the general direction would be great.

I've tried attractor POP, creep POP and SOP, tangent SOP, and several other things. it should be easy, and that's making it all the more frustrating. The effect I'm looking for is comparable to the Maya "goals" for particles.

Any tips? Many thanks in advance.

[symek]

For the life of me I haven't been able to find out how to make particles flow through a nurbs tube, from one end to the other. I don't want them on the tube's surface, i want them inside the tube. random movement while still following the general direction would be great.

I've tried attractor POP, creep POP and SOP, tangent SOP, and several other things. it should be easy, and that's making it all the more frustrating. The effect I'm looking for is comparable to the Maya "goals" for particles.

Any tips? Many thanks in advance.

This awesome video is partly about your issue. Watch it, use it, send greetings to FrenchOP - the athor . It's much more there then driving particles, but still there are so many ways to do it, so see just one of them.

[anamous]

This awesome video is partly about your issue. Watch it, use it, send greetings to FrenchOP - the athor . It's much more there then driving particles, but still there are so many ways to do it, so see just one of them.

Thanks SYmek. I've seen the video before, and while it is great (thanks FrenchOP ), I can't get my own streams to have random movement inside the volume of the tube.

[exel]

For the life of me I haven't been able to find out how to make particles flow through a nurbs tube, from one end to the other. I don't want them on the tube's surface, i want them inside the tube. random movement while still following the general direction would be great.

I've tried attractor POP, creep POP and SOP, tangent SOP, and several other things. it should be easy, and that's making it all the more frustrating. The effect I'm looking for is comparable to the Maya "goals" for particles.

Any tips? Many thanks in advance.

I haven't found that kind of thing to be easy at all, at least not by using point forces and attractor stuff. I'm a big fan of the creep SOP with particles, I feel like I can get a lot of control over the particles and take some of the more difficult stuff out of POPs and into SOPs. Here's an example -- it's a quick cheesy trick (I'm a fan of cheesy tricks) and it may not be quite what you're looking for, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway... using the creep SOP's Z scale and translate parms to offset the particle stream so it appears to be inside the tube... movement isn't very random to start with but maybe with some additional manipulation inside POPs it would do the trick? Not very sophisticated I know, but it could be a starting point for bigger and better things?

HTH,

-JS-

ptcls_in_tube.hip

[SpencerL]

Hey, here is another example that is very straight forward. I think you are on the right track using an attractor to drive the "flow" of the particles. All ive done is just use a line SOP that is the attractor which goes through the center of the tube SOP. Use the tube SOP as a collision object and voila, they are flowing inside the tube. Doing it this way still enables you to manipulate the particles behavior. Just remember that if you change the shape of the tube, you need to do the same to the line SOP. Hope this helps.

particleTube_001.zip

[edward]

Interesting example to play with. Here's my changes to it. Mostly in the area of building the tube from the curve. In my case, I added an Interact POP to push apart the particles abit to get the nice rolling action going.

Anyhow, if one is looking for "particle goals", isn't that the Follow POP? Possibly the Orbit POP? The online help has some nice examples.

particleTube_ed.hipnc

[anamous]

thank you so much guys. man, i love this place

trying out your scenes immediatly.