February 2, 2011

Particle systems come to the rescue when you have many objects to animate, such as fairy dust, rain, or even crowds of people. Particles are an essential tool for the professional visual effects artist.

In this hour-long series of eight free videos, you’ll learn how to control Maya particle and emitter nodes. We explore the Maya particle workflow, including animation, shading, and rendering. Some of the learning outcomes of this tutorial include:

Create a particle system with an emitter
Change particle and emitter attributes
Customize per-particle attributes with Creation Expressions
Employ the rand and seed MEL functions for consistent randomness
Map the Transparency of particles over their lifespan
Add special effects with Shader Glow
Build a Particle Disk Cache for faster and reliable rendering
Batch Render with the Maya Software renderer
Export an image sequence to a movie in Quicktime Pro

Supplemental material

particles_wand_start.zip

This small Zip file includes a Maya ASCII scene used in the tutorial. It has a procedural shader on the ground plane and a Ramp texture on a camera Image Plane.

Supplemental material

Lesson Notes

Lesson Notes complement tutorials. They reduce complex multi-stage procedures to short bullet points. Brief explanations reinforce key concepts. The outline format helps learners focus on the content, rather than spend a lot of time reading. To access Lesson Notes, you need to join the guild.

Here is a sample of the Lesson Notes:

1. Particle Systems concepts
   1. Good for special effects such as weather, fog, crowds
   2. Many attributes to adjust
   3. Working with particle systems is an industry specialization within effects animation
2. Dynamics > Particles > Create Emitter
   1. An emitter generates particles over time
   2. An emitter may be animated directly or linked to a parent to make it move
   3. There are different Types of emitters; we are using the default Omni
3. Emitter attributes
   1. Rate is the number of particles born per second
   2. Speed is how fast the particles move away from the emitter
      1. Speed Random is a plus-or-minus factor
      2. For example, with Speed of 2, and Speed Random of 0.5, the range of possible speeds is 1.5 to 2.5
   3. Min Distance and Max Distance control particle birth location, distance from emitter
      1. For example, with Min Distance of 0 and Max Distance of 3, particles will be born within a radius of 3 units

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