How do you make rain in maya, I'm pretty sure its done with particles, but from there, how do I actually get rain?
Also, how do you PERMANANTLY combine to nurbs primitves, like a sphere and a cube together, to become one object, I know about grouping but I want to go farther than that and have them as ONE single object. any suggestions on these questions?
Thanks
nickolas

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Nickolas

Sorry, can't help w/ the first request but, if you want a
good lesson on combining objects, go to the video
tutorials and "do the dog"...in part two I believe,
there is a series of steps to show how to mirror/duplicate
and combine.

Good luck!

TH

You can create rain by using PaintFX, you'll see a weather folder in your visor, just choose rain and paint it in your viewport. To animate it go to the individual strokes and keyframe changes in them. You can do it with particles as well, just seems like a lot more work to me

To permanentely join two Nurbs objects, use the Nurb's Boolean Tool

Darkon

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Red bellows of flame have blackened my stones
Convulsing my frame and cracking my bones
Hell's dragons of steel who roar in their chains
Crawl into my caves to suck out my veins.....

-The Mountain P.F.M.

You can also use particle effects for rain. I'm planning on making a VIP tutorial involving rain and snow in the future.

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

Originally posted by mtmckinley
I'm planning on making a VIP tutorial involving rain and snow in the future.

Originally Posted by

that would be cool

Thanks for the help, but how do I get PaintFX, I downloaded the PaintFX plugin from AW's website and when I try to load it, it tells me, "Error: No plug-ins loaded - "The specified procedure could not be found."
Any suggestions?

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Nickolas

PaintFX are already part of Maya You can use them to paint on a canvas (2d), your viewport (3d), or a Nurbs object (also 3d) . If you want to canvas paint, all you need do to call up the screen is to hit the "8" key on your keyboard. Then you will see relevant menus. Down below in the tut section I wrote something up on canvas painting you may want to look at.

For using PaintFX on a Nurbs you need to first make the object Paintable. You will find that option under the Paint FX menu, it's under the Rendering pulldown. Then you go to visor which is where all the brushes are located, you also want the Edit Template Settings window so you can change settings as you go. With PaintFX you can choose to paint an object or the viewport, for rain I would paint the viewport, so make sure that is checked.

That was kind of quick and not very thorough, the manuals and online help have far greater info

Darkon

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Red bellows of flame have blackened my stones
Convulsing my frame and cracking my bones
Hell's dragons of steel who roar in their chains
Crawl into my caves to suck out my veins.....

-The Mountain P.F.M.

I Think you can also create rain through MEL.....but that would be more difficult to do. As I see it....the more realistic animations are done through MEL.....not sure but scripting has always been more powerful and with more control imo.

Here's a quick way with particles ...

... create a plane, select Particles->Emit from object->option box, choose Surface emitter type (I'd sugest tubes for particle type ...);
add a gravity field to the particles and you have the basic setup ...
... now you can put a second plane to act as the ground, set some collision events (select the particles and the plane->Make Collide), use mel for randomness (like drop size, speed ... etc) ...
... but this is just the beginning, if you need more details I'm glad to help.

great 1st post Razvan!! welcome to the board mate!

I've completed the VIP rain/snow tutorials... just need to get them compiled and uploaded to the site. I'll try to remember to announce them here when I get them up.

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

Thanks for the welcome Kevin, I'm really new to this board ... seems a nice one ...