What you'll learn

Throughout these lessons, we'll develop an easy to control crowd simulation system with geometry instanced to Maya's nParticles. Maya's robust particle instancing system, along with the ability to precisely control particle movement along a surface, makes it easy to create an army of insects crawling along a surface. By emitting into secondary nParticle objects we'll create the illusion of insects falling, or taking off from, that surface. Creation and runtime expressions, along with noise and ramp nodes, will be used to build an end user friendly control system that will govern all aspects of particle behavior including birth, death, emission rate, and movement. Software required: Maya 2014, NUKE.