Particles to conform the shape of a hiden mesh

[jonyto-jonyto]

Hi all, and please excuse my english.

 I'm trying since yesterday without succes, someone maybe could help me?

 i have this mesh, a model of a character, wich is hiden for the camera. And i need to create the ilusion of a stream of particles that after travelling a while, they start to form the silhouette (3d surface) of the character (without going inside and filling it).

 Using nparticles, plus making the geometry a passive rigide body and making it the goal of the nparticles i can get very close to the desired result. I can make it work for a sphere or a torus, but when the geometry is more complex as the character, i cant propagate them uniformily all over the surface.

 Maybe someone can point me a tutorial or give some advice about  maybe constraints or fields or other tricks to make this thing work.

Thanks!

[chartt]

If you have nice UVs on the character - you could create it as the goal.

You then have 2 goals to set:

Horizontal (depth) on the edge of the character - say the U value - say 0 and 0.5 - left and right side respectively (these values are not correct - as I don't know the UV values of your character)

Then the vertical is then the height - V value - 0 - 1  assuming that 0 is where the feet are and 1 is where the head is.

You could create a front projection - a new uvmap - through your character - and then these values  will work.

Then you can add a PerParticle attribute of an offset - use sphere particles - and the offset will be equal to 1/2 the radius of the sphere - so that they will sit on the surface, not 1/2 in and 1/2 out.

Have fun.

Chris 

[jonyto-jonyto]

Thanks a lot Chris, very useful! 

 Thanks.