POP merge?

[Ratman]

So I've been rattling my head trying to do this.

I have one popnet that is very basic, shooting some particles, null to send it out to sops, back in sops I'm doing some procedures to it with copy and whatnod, and now that system is complete. Now here is the part I'm stuck, I want to create another popnet that references the first popnet so that it has the same behavior, but now inside the popnet I want to do some splits and other procedures, and in the end at SOP level merge these two together.

So my question is, is there some sort of POP Merge, kinda like Object Merge in sops, I looked at referencing the first popnet creating a source and and in birthday use an npoints() expression to reference the first popnet, that does some of the right things, but it keeps the constant activation and I end up with a non-desirable result.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Rick

[ragupasta]

I think the FetchPOP will do, if I understand what you are trying to do.

[Ratman]

Ok tried the Fetch POP and it was pretty useless since the life attributes weren't working so I wasn't able to use group based on death right.

The method I got working is using a source pop and sourcing the particle system and matching the birth rate and life, working better so far.

[anakin78z]

Hmn... there are two approaches I can think of:

1. Do everything in the first popnet and put your particles into groups, so that your can easily grab your original ones to do what you're already doing. Any nodes after a split pop will not affect particles which are feeding into it, so this shouldn't change the behavior of your original particles.

2. Use the Pop Merge in Sops to bring in your original particles. Isolate the particles you want to create new split particles from and delete all others. Append a pop network and in a Source Pop, set the Geometry Source parameter to Use First Context Geometry. Set your Impulse Birth Rate to $NPT and your Constant Birth Rate to 0. This will create a particle for each of your points. Alternatively you could create many more, then build your new pop network after that to do what you need your particles to do.

Hope this helps,

-z