Paintfx Galaxy Brush To Polygon Unexpected Results

[1012]

I'm getting unexpected results when converting the PaintFX Galaxy brush to polygons in Maya 2008 on OS X. The resulting geometry is a hexagon per star, where the edges of the hexagons are polygonal faces and the center of the hexagon is hollow. The resulting renders are not similar to the galaxy. It's pretty easy to try out. Does anyone had any success with this?

[1012]

My current thought is to separate out the hexagons, iterate through the resulting polygonal objects, collapse them to points and instance a simple sphere to them. In this way I can quickly paint with the galaxy brush and with a script replace the individual stars with spheres. Seems a bit brutish, but in this way I get the geometry I'm looking for with the expressiveness of PaintFX. Please let me know if anyone has a better solution.

[1012]

1. Select the Galaxy strokes
2. Convert to Polys

The resulting polys will all be named "polySurface" + an index number. Take note of the number of surfaces created.

1. Create an emitter with speed 0 and rate 10000000 (really high)
2. Set the resulting particle's max count to the number of surfaces created
3. Advance a frame
4. Select the particles
5. Solver > Set Initial State for selected
6. Delete the emitter
7. Execute the following script and be sure to set the startRange, endRange of the polygons produced by the convert to polys command. In my case the command produced polyShape2 - polyShape859. Also set the particle name and particle name shape variables.

[codebox]//------------------------------------------------------------
// Setup
int $startRange = 2;
int $endRange = 859;
string $pName = "pStars";
string $pShapeName = "pStarsShape";

string $name;
float $_p[];
vector $p;

int $i = $startRange;
int $pIndex = 0;

// Iterate over the geometry
for ($i; $i<$count; ++$i) {
$name = "polySurface"+$i;
select -r $name;

// Center Pivot
xform -cp;

// Get Scale Pivot Position
$_p = eval("getAttr " + $name + ".scalePivot");
$p = <>;

$pIndex = $i-2;
eval("select " + $pShapeName + ".pt[" + $pIndex+ "]");
eval("setParticleAttr -vv " + $p + "-at position " + $pName);
}
//-----------------------------------------------------------[/codebox]

1. Select the particles and set their initial state again
2. You can then just use the Instancer to instance a bunch of star colored spheres to your particles.

This could obviously be streamlined, but for a one off here you go.
.xX