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Setting Up Forces for Each Particle Type

After you’ve created a force (see Natural Forces), you need to set up the sensitivity to the force for each particle type that is defined for the particle, fluid, or explosion cloud. (For information on particle types, see Creating Particle Types.)

The values you set for the parameters here specify the degree to which the natural force acts upon that particular particle type. This means that you can have each particle type react differently to a force, including not being affected by a force at all.

This also means that you can leave a force’s values the same (useful if the force is affecting multiple objects in a scene) while changing only the particle type’s reaction to it.

To set up forces per particle type

1. Apply forces to a particle cloud as described in Applying a Force.

2. Open the particle type’s Particle Type property editor.

3. Click the Envir. tab and modify the values for each parameter that correspond to the forces acting on the particle type (that is, if you have gravity affecting the particle cloud, set the Gravity parameter’s value).

The settings you use here represent a percentage of the “global” effect that the force has. The value for any parameter here must be greater than 0 (zero) for its corresponding force to have an effect.

By default, each parameter’s value is set to 1 so that the effect works immediately at 100% of its strength, but you can change it to any value.

As with other particle type parameters, you can animate these parameters in different ways such as age, birth, and constant. For more information, see Animating Particle Type Parameters.

You can also set the Var (variance) value for each parameter, as well as the type of variance (Uniform or Gaussian). See Adding Variation to Particles for more information.

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