This is one of the mid-point scenes in my short 3D magic cat animation, it’s called “Caramel cat and the Flowers”. This is quite an important scene where the cat actually magics up the flowers, although this turns out to be a mixed blessing for him, tee hee.
I had got to the point where I had nice little magical motes flying out of the hands of my 3D magic cat, and I wanted them to turn into flowers, which meant creating 3D flowers, and have Blender shoot them into the sky instead of particles. This is a process that seems to be called dupliverting, if I’m not mistaken.
The old system used to be very complex, Doc:Tutorials/Physics/BSoD/Particles – BlenderWiki, requiring the parenting of the mesh to be flung about by the particle system, in my case flowers.
Luckily the new particle system is much easier (in this tutorial the rockets are added with the new system). But even so it took me ages to get it to work. I think my problem was once again the fact that I had rescaled my models to quite a small size – for no good reason, I just like to try stuff – and the particle system is very susceptible to scale changes. Or appending the particle system caused the problems, after deleting the appended version, the one I built from scratch worked. Either that or during one of my futile rounds of knob twiddling I fixed something I’m not aware of. All I know is, one moment it wasn’t working and the next moment it was.
It worked but it took an age to render (I’m talking 3 days), and when it was done there was a cryptic warning message in the black Blender window – “failed to save over existing file”. I broke out in a cold sweat, I don’t mind admitting it. The .mov file worked however – thank heavens – but I’m seriously considering going to the bother of rendering to an image sequence from now on.
Well, on to the next scene. The flowers now have to fall on to the grass like rain, oh no! Particles again!
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