NOTE: names of the innocent removed for safety
Sorry It took sooo long to reply to you bud, but my day job has robbed me of any social life.....Hi rage, had a question.
Was wondering how to make sure particles stay away from vertex by <space> or from a polygonal object.. Making it collide isn't really working and applying fields to the vertex would be totally overdone i.m.o.... I'm sure it can be done in mel...
Hope you PM me back soon, or better, come to the IRC channel
Thanks!
Anyhoo, if you still want a trick to deal with that issue, I've got at least 2 ideas for you to try:
1. I've seen/heard tricks of others using a WRAP deformer made of super-basic NURBS shapes that have primary visibility turned off, and that wrapper object(s) is used as the "SOURCE" of a field, and/or since it is simple geometry, the vert count doesn't need to be too high, so using the verts of the WRAP object(S) shouldn't be too heavy, so you could apply fields to that on a per-vert basis as well.
-OR-
2. Because I am a compositor by trade, I would try a cheat.
Remember that you can use a lower count of particles rendered in many passes, and comp them together to seem like a super-dense swarm, complete with shadows, depth, etc. and that also would be way more controllable too.
Good luck!!
