Particle sprite randomisation

[landru]

I have recently started roughing out an animation of multiple robot characters falling (as they fall their arms move from being flat at their sides to straight out with wing geometry shooting out from the side of torso and hooking up to their arms) from an extremely tall building as viewed from one of the floors close to the top of the building...

due to the amount of geometry involved I decided to use a sprite animation linked to the particles as opposed to using the particle instancer, the only problem i'm having with this method is getting a random start/end point for each different particle sprite.

Unfortunatly i'm not the best at particle expressions, so the best i've done up to this point is to link the file frame number to the frame (file1.frameExtension = frame; ) but the result is not what i wanted.

Ideally I would like to link the start point for the animation to a specific point on the y axis, and also have the first frame (arms by the side) viewed before the particle hits the point on the y axis and the last frame (arms straight out) viewed after the sprite animation has finished.

As far as i know it would have something to do with linking the particle ID and the frame number to the value of the particle in Y, but i'm not sure how to achieve this, so any help anyone could give would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Landru

[failure]

Ypu could use Particles->Sprite Wizard to set things up for you and then tweak from there.

Or if you want to do it manually:

• create shader with file texture and assign it to particles.

• in file texture attributes, set "Image name" to the first file in sequence, enable "Use Frame Extension", enable "Use Hardware Cycling" and set start and end extension number to that of your file sequence.

-create expression:
int $fps = 25; // frame rate
particleShape1.spriteNumPP = particleShape1.age * $fps

This will put sequence images on the sprites and link it to sprite age, advancing one image per frame.
You can control spriteNumPP with y position as well. The procedure is same.

[landru]

Cheers Failure

Thats exactly what i was looking for...

You DA Man

Landru