CompuServe Thread

I know that lots of you out there love to offer suggestions on animating techniques, so….. I need to animate a soil rotary dryer, from the end, showing what is essentially like going to the laundry-mat, late one evening with a bucket of dirt (and a six pack), putting the load of dirt in the big dryer (the kind with a window in the front) and watching the dirt go around and around. I have tried 2D morphing, disintegrate, rain, spurt, and tornado (one of my favorites). The only thing that I can get slightly close is disintegrate. I used several pie pieces all individually setup as follows: 1. rotate the pie, inside the boxed object, back 30-60 degrees so that when I rotate the boxed object to about 60 degrees before I blow it apart, the gravity vector is then pointing down as it should be; 2. rotate the individual pies (and boxes) back so that the bottom half of the drum is filled with dirt "pies"; 3. Stagger the IPAS frames back so that the "hold" frames in the IPAS setup are 10 frames advanced for each pie; 4. set init. vel. to about 80 and gravity to 5 I rotate them all foward 30 degrees, disintegrate the first one ("end" is well past my last frame so that I don't lose all the particles), rotate another 30 degress, disintegrate the next one…… Oh, and BTW I am using a mask (or matte object) so that any stray particles don't blow out of the drum. Well, it just doesn't cut it, you know? Any other suggestions? BTW, I have to just about collect aluminum cans to get any new IPAS routines so let's try to stay with what I've got insofar as routines. Thanks! Chris