Tips for advanced users

User Guide > Dynamics and Effects > Dynamics > Particles > Work with emitters >

In the Attribute Editor, you can click the color swatch of the emitter’s Particle Color attribute to apply a color rather than a texture to emitted particles. If you’ve already connected a texture to the Particle Color attribute, you must first break the input connection to it from the texture’s outColor attribute. You can break the connection in the Hypergraph’s dependency graph.
If you add multiple emitters to a surface, you create multiple emitted particle objects—one for each emitter. You can use the Dynamic Relationships Editor to disconnect all the emitted particle objects from the emitters and reconnect a single one to all the emitters. Each emitter will emit only that particle object with its attribute settings.
The Attribute Editor for each of the emitters has its own texture emission attributes, so you can apply a different texture (or color) to each group of particles even though each emitter emits the same particle object.

With this technique, you can layer a single emitted particle object with various colors to create complex particle effects such as smoke or fire. The particles use the emitted particle object’s attributes except for color (and optionally opacity), regardless of which emitter emits them.

For example, suppose you add two surface emitters to a plane and connect a single particle object to the emitters. The plane can emit particles colored by a black and white checker texture at the same time as particles colored by a purple to yellow ramp texture. The particles are a single emitted particle object. You can display the emitted particles as any render type, for example, spheres, by setting the appropriate attribute in the Attribute Editor for the emitted particle object.