Maya: Instancing a Mesh to Particles
Posted September 25th, 2013 by winningcHow to Instance Mesh with Particles – PDF
Above is a PDF guide I created that has step by step screenshot examples of how to instance a mesh and apply it to the particles of a particle emitter.
Below are the easy steps to doing this:
To instance a single object to particles
- Select source geometry.
- Shift-select the particle shape.
- Select Particles > Instancer (Replacement).
- To hide the source geometry, select the geometry and select Display > Hide > Hide Selection.
(As a reminder make sure you put extra frames in your timeline so the particles have time to emit… I used 300 frames)
The last two pages of the PDF are examples of altering and scaling the mesh, all of the instanced particles will experience the same alterations as your source mesh.
March 27th, 2014 at 9:18 am
// Warning: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2014/scripts/others/performDynamics.mel line 1326: The last item in the selection list must be the particle to which to add instances.
Can you help?
April 8th, 2014 at 7:07 pm
Thanks for commenting! I’ll look into that message and post again in a bit (pretty sure you only have one little thing wrong, like the order in which you’re selecting the meshes and instances).