Instancing Animated Geometry To Particles
Maya's particle instancing feature saves you time when you need to animate many identical objects in a scene. For example, suppose you want to create a group of flying bugs where only the placement and orientation of the bugs differ. With Maya, you can animate a single bug, then create instances of the bugs that move with the position and orientation of animated particles.
The instances are not copies. They are references to the original object. Any changes you make to the original object changes the instanced objects. You can control the motion of the individual instanced objects by animating the per particle attributes that control them.
The instanced geometry object, called the source geometry, can be:
- a single object, animated or not animated.
- a sequence of objects in different shapes or positions. An example of an object sequence is a series of nearly identical bird objects in different wing-flapping positions. A disadvantage of this method is that you can't render the object sequence with motion blur.
- different objects to be displayed at different particles.
You can use object hierarchies instead of individual objects as the source geometry. Do not instance lights; they'll have no effect in rendering.
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