Using Maya particle instancing lets you animate many identical objects in a scene. For example, you can use particle instancing to quickly create and animate a group of flying bugs where only the placement and orientation of the bugs differ. You can animate a single bug, then create instances of the bug’s geometry that move with the position and orientation of animated particles. You can also use nParticle per-particle attributes, such as per-particle rotations, with instanced geometry so that each object rotates individually.
Instances of geometry are not duplicates of an object, but are references (not file referencing) of the original object. Any changes you make to the original object also apply to the instanced objects. You can control the motion of the individual instanced objects by animating the per-particle attributes that control them. For example, you can use the nParticle rotation per-particle attributes for creating the realistic behavior of randomly moving objects, such flying debris in an explosion effect.
The instanced geometry object, called the source geometry, can be:
You can use object hierarchies instead of individual objects as the source geometry. Do not instance lights; they’ll have no effect in rendering.
For particle instancing options see Particles > Instancer (Replacement).
The runup command may fail to create instanced geometry when rendering arbitrary frames in an animation. Adding a currentTime setting before the runup creates the instanced geometry properly; that is, if something like runup -mxf 60; does not create the proper results when rendering with instanced geometry, use:
currentTime -e 1; runup -mxf 60;
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