You can use strokes from Paint Effects as instanced objects for particles. The image below was created using Paint Effects strokes instanced to particles.
See the Paint Effects, Artisan and 3D Paint guide for information on painting in your scene, and see Instance geometry to particles (single and animated) of this book for information on instancing.
When you instance an object to a particle, the local origin of the object is instanced to the particle. With spheres and cubes, the local origin is the center of the object.
With the NURBS curves that comprise the strokes in Paint Effects, however, the local origin is not directly related to the geometry of the curve. No matter where you actually draw the curve, its origin is the world origin. For example, if you draw a short stroke in the workspace at position 5,0,5 to get a single flower and instance it to a particle object, the flowers will be offset from the particles by 5,0,5.
To center the Paint Effects geometry on your particles, there’s a few things you can do. The obvious one is to start your curve at the origin. Unfortunately, this is hard to do in regular Paint Effects mode because you draw the curve, instead of placing down the CVs with grid snapping. We suggest the following procedures:
To center instanced strokes on particles (method 1)
You move the CVs instead of the transform because the top-most translation and rotation of the instanced hierarchy is ignored.
