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Overview of particles
Particles
Advanced particle topics
Particle objects
A particle object is a collection
of particles that share the same attributes. You can create particle
objects containing a single particle or millions of particles. Each
particle in a scene belongs to some particle object. An overview
of how you create particle effects follows:
Creating particles
You can create particles several ways:
- Place
particles in the workspace with the Particle Tool (see
Create particles).
- Create
a particle emitter, which generates and animates the motion of particles
automatically (see
Emitters).
- Cause
particles that collide with geometry to create new particles upon contact
(see
Particle collisions).
Set display attributes
You change the way particles look with several
techniques:
Animate the particles
You can animate particle motion several ways:
- Set
the position, velocity, or acceleration attributes of particles.
You can also set keys to animate an entire particle object’s translate,
scale, and rotate attributes. See
Animate particles
- Apply
fields, such as gravity, to particles (see
Overview of fields).
- Turn
geometry into a collision object and bounce particles off it (see
Particle collisions).
- Make
the particles follow a moving goal object (see
Goals).
Render the particles
Rendering is the final step to creating particle
effects. Depending on the render type you select, you render the
particles with hardware rendering or software rendering. See
Choose how particles render.