2009

■ The particle material cannot be a submaterial; it must be the main material.

■ In the non-event-driven particle systems in 3ds Max, Particle MBlur is used

with a control named Direction Of Travel\MBlur and an accompanying

Stretch parameter. In Particle Flow, you can replicate the stretching effect

by using a Scale operator, turning off Scale Factor > Constrain Properties,

and scaling the particle along one axis.

I’m trying to apply Particle Flow to an animation created with a

dynamics system.Why am I getting strange results such as unexpected

spawning of particles?

The dynamics system probably generates rotation keys using the Euler XYZ

controller. To avoid interpolation discontinuities, change the rotation

controller for such objects to TCB Rotation.

How can I make all particles appear in the first frame while giving

them different ages?

Use a negative frame range in the

Birth operator on page 2844. For example, to

get a particle-age spread of 30 frames, set Emit Start to -29 and Emit Stop to

How can I specify the time frame in which animated parameters are

applied to particles?

You can animate many of the Particle Flow parameter values with keyframing.

In most actions, you can choose the time frame by which to apply this

animation to the particles from a drop-down list labeled Sync By. You can

apply this animation to particles in the time frame of the entire animation,

or at a specific time of each particle's life (particle age), or based on the length

of time the particle has been in the current event. See the individual operator

and test topics for details.

How can I apply bubble motion to particles?

Although Particle Flow doesn't have the

bubble motion option on page 3067

found in PArray, you can simulate the effect by following this procedure:

1 Add an object to serve as particle geometry and a dummy helper object

on page 2615.

2 Position the dummy away from the center of the particle geometry object

and link on page 3342 your particle geometry to the dummy so that the

2808 | Chapter 14 Space Warps and Particle Systems