Filling a Volume with Particles

May, 2003

"When they tried to pull his skeleton away from the one he held in his arms it crumbled into dust."

Introduction

It seems hard to model a character burst into dust. One may try emitting particles from surface, but the effect is not quite good. So I write a MEL script as a particle tool to fill a volume.

fillvolume.rar

How to Use It

Select a NURBS sphere and click the "Do" button, a new particle object will be created

There are only 4 particles in the object since the step is 1.0. Using lower step, we get more and more particles.

step = 0.5

step = 0.25

Using zero noise, we get particle array.

Lower step leads to higher sample rate and longer calculate time, so always try to keep the volume as small as possible and use step as large as possible.

Using more complex volume, we have a vase made up of particles.

Since the script depends on the surface normal to decide whether the possible particle is in the volume, so make sure the surface normals are pointing out.

Instead of manually setting the calculation boundary, the script offers another option to use the boundary box information of the surface as the the calculation boundary. You can transform the surface freely without fussing about the boundary.

To fill polygonal volumes, you must load the closestPointOnMesh plugin. The only version I can find is compiled for Maya 4.0.

Change "Volume Type" to polygon, you must use boundary box and freeze all transformations of the polygon mesh before it can be correctly filled.

A combined polygon mesh.

More than 4,300 particles rendered in multi-point.