Major particle problem!

[ryan3d]

ok Im making smoke eminate from a blown up building, Im useing the Missile trail tutorial as a reference for 99% of my settings....ok when i play the animation in maya and watch the particles they do what they are supposed to do, and when i stop it half way and render a still they look good. My problem comes when i go to render the animation, the smoke particles do something completely different, they show up and start forming a huge blob that gets bigger and bigger....WHy? i mean when i play the anim' and render a still they look great, but as soon as i render they animation they get all buggered up as if they have a mind of their own...anyone?

[mads-tuxen]

Create a particle-cashe before you render the animation. Look under particles. If you have already done so the deleete it and make a new one. Also motionblur does not work with particles so make sure u turn it off for the particles.

Mads

[gmask]

Is your playback playing every frame or playing at a frame rate.. you need to playback everyframe or you will not ssee the correct calculation when you render. Do a cache.

[ryan3d]

after i did the cache my scene was filled with particles, so much so that i couldnt even move around without having to wait for it to update for like 5 mins.....but the cache created the same Blob that my rendered anim's do.....weird stuff....ima keep fiddleing to see what happens......

[ryan3d]

yeah i was playing it at 24 fps, i switched it to everyframe....still looks decent, but yeah the particle cache did what my anim renders do they created this huge blob of particles and i had to CTRL+ALT+DEL shut down maya cuz it was so bogged down wth particles.........crazy....ill keep ya updated, maybe it was my settings in the cahe settings

[mantrid]

hmm...sometimes the particle cahce screws up in this way and to remove it and start a new working particle cache you must not just choose to delete and disable it, but you must manually disable it also... solvers>editt oversampling...> ...switch off "Use particle disk cache"...and it still ain't done here...you then have to save your scene with a new name/version number and then finally, the particles should be back to normal as will your cache when you make a new one. Maya's particle cache has always been buggy like this and doesn't seem to have been improved in 4.5

If you are still having problems I can take a look at your scene file and try to fix it for you.

[ryan3d]

yeah i tried those steps to deleteing it and whatnot..then i tried to re-cache it and it did the same crap!(that crazy amount/blob problem) i just dont get why when i play ithe animation within maya at everyframe it looks great, but then when i render it goes all crazy

[pinxue]

It doesn't by any chance have to do with the expression that the tutrorial has in it, Does it? You know where it has the expression for radiusPP, in the runtime section you do something like radiusPP += .001.....If they're getting huge, maybe you didn't put the right number in there like .1 or something, instead of .001.....(at least I think that tutorial has an expression like that, maybe I'm thinkin of something else though...!)

[ryan3d]

^^^yeah Ive checked all those settings....it could be it, but you see when i watch the animation from within maya they dont get so big and basically are perfect....only when i render out the animation do they go all crazy, flood the scene, and get huge......

[mantrid]

just taking a bit of a stab in the dark here....have you checked your 'near clip plane' for the bamera? make sure it is set to 0.001 and try rendering again. It could be that the near clip plane of the camera rendering is obscuring the particles and you are only seeing those beyond a certain distance...so it looks like a a blob.

Also, check that all your cameras other than the one you want to render from, have "renderable" switched off in the output tab in attributes.

Like I said before anyways...if you are despirate, just email me your scene file and I'll fix it for you.

[ryan3d]

^^^Yeah I might need your help, ill know by tomorrow, i might just make the smoke in C*, the thing is that i dont think the C* smoke looks too hot, id rather use cg paticles for the effect....Im gonna check the near clip plane and render it again to see if thats it....thnx alot for your help by the way.