[Brian Jones]

oh yeah, if it is Rotation that you want you don’t see correct results unless you render

[Brian Jones]

it’s not position and rotation that you want probably, I think you want Offset X but try with a test sphere and the same image in a Projector shader but in the color channel so you can see what’s going on

[Brian Jones]

it sounds like you might be in the right place

in the Hair Mat/Length channel Texture slot choose Effects/Projector (which is what I think you were talking about so, so far so good)
Click on Projector (now that it’s there) and it opens up and presents a new Texture slot where you want to put your image file – the settings below are the ones you would use to offset the image (in effect rotating around the sphere) with lots of additional controls to tweak the position/rotation/size etc.

[Brian Jones]

use a Projector shader in the length of the hair mat, put the bitmap in the projector shader and you get the same offset/length etc controls there as you normally get in the material tag.

[Brian Jones]

I don’t know if you can, TP doesn’t do subframe calculations (you can sort of do subframe emission but not subframe calculations) so the particles are moving that far in between frames and can only adjust after.

[Brian Jones]

I don’t think it will work – I just had done a test with a circle spline around a box then cloned that out. Any spline part in front of a box is blurring correctly but the boxes and splines are pretty close to each other.
It’s obvious the DOF is based on the geometry Depth Map and even though S&T can produce a depth map which includes splines correctly it’s not being used

[Brian Jones]

interesting, a spline always blurs max regardless of distance unless it’s in front of geometry then it blurs correctly… useful info for later.

[Brian Jones]

this is simplified but this is all that’s necessary – important bits are
– direction of the splines (you can tell in point mode with a spline selected)
– take a look at where the spline groups are used in the emitters and the follow splines

It looks like you been in the Thinking Particles Settings dialog which is good as that’s the place to make new groups and drag them to the places in the emitters (xpresso really) where they are used.

9129_tpfollowsplinefix.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

both emitters and Follow Splines are using ‘All’ as the group since no group is chosen so when the one spline gets closer than the Trigger Distance to the other spline whichever is on top in the OM takes over. You have to use different groups for each emitter/follow/spline combo

[Brian Jones]

in 16 S&T and DOF (built-in) work fine together (I was surprised)