Gertie, Interrupted Poster

Particle Systems

Introduction

When we first began making Gertie, Interrupted, I was interested in implementing particle systems. It was clear after drawing up the storyboard that particles could play a very important part in the movie. Our movie included a fireball, dust clouds, water splashes, smoke swirls, etc... All of these things can be modeled and controlled using particle systems.

Sources

Here are the papers and articles that I read to prepare myself. If you are interested in implementing particle systems, these links should give you more than enough information to help you meet this goal.

The Process

Fundamentally, my particle system implementation is a C++ program. The Maya plugin was built around this C++ program. The goal of my plugin was to allow high level generation of particle systems within Maya. By high-level, I mean the user should be able to say, "I want to create a dust cloud" and not, "I need a particle system with an average per particle velocity of .75, an average per particle life span of 75 frames, this dust cloud per particle update function, ..." In order to meet this larger goal, two things had to be true:
  1. The C++ program had to have enough flexibility that new particle system types could be easily added.
  2. The user interface in Maya had to be easy to use and carefully defined.
To meet the first goal, I read Building an Advanced Particle System by John van der Burg. This article describes the types of parameters that particle systems need in order to allow greater flexibility.

Using my Maya Plugin

Step 1: Download My Plugin

There are actually two parts to my plugin:

Step 2: Set Your Environment Variables

First, you need to set two Maya environment variables in windows.

Step 3: Start Maya

Note: If Maya is already running, close it and restart it. Maya will not work right otherwise.

Step 4: Load the Plugin

Opening Plugin Manager

Open the Plugin Manager as shown above.

Loading the Plugin

Check the "loaded" box next to ParticlePlugin.mll in the Plugin Manager as shown above.

Step 5: Create a New Particle System

Plugin Menu

When the plugin loaded, it should have added a plugin menu to Maya's menu bar, as shown above. Click on the "Particle Systems" menu item.

Particle System Creation UI

After selecting the menu item, the window above should appear. There are seven particle system types that can be created. Clicking OK will create the new particle system.

Step 6: Tweek the Particle System

All of the basic Maya controls will work with the new particle system (move, scale, rotate, etc...)

A New Particle System

To tweek the internal particle parameters, click on the particle system and press CTRL-A to open the Attribute Editor. This is shown above. The parameters that you can change are:

Scenes that include particles

Fireball Stomp
Rocket
The fireball, the pieces of smashed house, the tail of the missles, the dust cloud around Gertie, and the water splashes were all created using my particle system plugin.
Dust Cloud Splashing Water
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Rachel Heck ©2002