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Can I access (and animate) objects inside particles using xpresso?
Hello,
The ultimate result I’m after is to have a field of randomly positioned bool objects. Each bool object is set to ‘A minus B’. Inside each one there are two objects, their initial state is that the ‘masking’ object completely overlaps the masked object, making it invisible. The masking objects should move upwards revealing the masked objects. These ‘reveal’ animations should be randomly staggered, giving the effect that more and more objects reveal themselves in this way as time progresses.
I’ve been trying to achieve this using thinking particles, but without success so far.
Here’s what I’ve done:
I set up a bool object with a ‘Reveal’ user data variable. The Reveal variable controls the Y position of the masking object inside the bool.
I set up a thinking particles Particle Storm emitter which generates these bool objects at random positions. This works as expected.
What I wanted to do next, but what I’m stuck with, is to use xpresso to have the age of a particle drive the ‘Reveal’ user data on the bool objects, so that by the time a particle is X frames old, the masked object inside the bool has been fully revealed.
Specifically, I can’t figure out how to access the child objects of an object that’s being used as a particle, when I’m accessing the particle with the P Pass node (is there another way?). I’d like to access and animate the Reveal user data that I’ve added to my bool object using xpresso.
Any help/suggestions most welcome!
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4 Replies
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do you have MoGraph?
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Yes i have mograph. Sorry, i meant to mention that–forgot to.
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if the reveal is always a constant speed then just animate the mask object in the boole and each particle will reveal itself after it’s created.
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That works perfectly. Thank you.
I had tried that approach earlier but for some reason the animation seemed to be running for all particles at the same moment (including for the as yet ‘unborn’ particles, which then later appeared in the fully revealed state). It could be that I was using the standard c4d emitter when I was getting that result, instead of thinking particles. I’m not sure any more though.
I also came across your example file ‘StepEffectorTime.c4d’ which seems to point to a mograph solution that may be a more elegant approach so I’ll look into that too.
Thanks again for your help!
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