CompuServe Thread

I've received Imagine 2.9 and it's great. After reviewing the docs I decided to try the particle emission from a moving rock/ice object. I used the primitive sphere with extra sections for more faces. Then i used magnetism in the perspective newmode. It was a pleasure to be able to change the object to any angle and pull a bell shape with the magnet. I had a fairly realistic smooth surface rock in about 5 minutes. The magnet was set up to affect about a third of the sphere at a time and I just kept affecting different areas at random. It was great! I've got some numbers for the particle emission if anyone wants to have a starting point. Set gravity to 0. I set speed to 30 for my 100 frame animation. I set wind start frame to -50. If you leave it at 1, then frame 1 will have the particles just starting to blow off the object. Make sure the angle of x is -180 to 180 and the angle of z is 0 to 180 or else the particles won't come off all of the object. I set emission % to 90. I guess I could have used 100. This has a lot of triangles coming off of the object. A couple of things I noticed. The emission seems to be only triangles and is not based on whether you set the object itself to be particles of any kind. also, it seems that my object was vertually invisible. Maybe because I had the emission so high. What I did was add a second identicle rock inti the scene with the same pirameters as the first rock minus the particle affect. One last thing I noticed. It seems that the wind blows across the x axis of the object and not the world, which meant that I could only rotate the x axis of the rock (assuming you want a rock that is turning). If you rotate z or y, the wind turns as well. All in all, it turned out quite well for the amount of time I spent and I might not be setting evrything up right yet.