Trying to trigger a specific affector - to activate a shockwave affect on a cue so that it instantly runs the effect when triggered. I’ve tried using the select child node to do it which will parent between the particle node and the affector but the effect is on a delay of 10 seconds so when the node is activated it doesn’t instantly trigger the effect; an indeterminate wait time of <10s is involved.
When I try to use the trigger node to trigger the effect I’m not able to parent it between the particle root and the shockwave affector; when I try to parent the entire particle system (which wouldn’t quite get me what I want as there are other affectors running separately on the particle system prior to the shockwave) I’m not able to get it to “work” - it seems like the whole system stops working? And when I try to look up the trigger node in the manual it says the topic you requested can not be found - is the trigger node deprecated?
Is there some other approach that I should take? What I’m trying to accomplish is that I have a particle system which runs with some smaller shockwaves that are occurring regularly, then one larger shockwave occurs which causes the rest of the shockwaves to stop and the particle system to stop emitting particles. Stopping the other effects & stopping the particles is fine - I’m just having trouble with getting the shockwave effect to behave as I’d like. I can get the precise timing behaviour I want from the explode affector but it really doesn’t generate the look I’m trying to achieve.
Perhaps not the approach you’d like, but if this project is going to be rendered out, or is timecoded rather than looping, you can always set your big Shockwave Affector node’s start time to the point you need it triggered. Check the keyboard shortcuts section of the manual for some useful timeline navigation and editing shortcuts.
Just remember that to stop the big shockwaves, you’ll need to keyframe the right value/s in the affector. Stopping the node short while it’s affecting the particles will cause the particles to jump.
Check out this tutorial for some really useful techniques using Field and Particle Systems together, might be useful/
Unfortunately, the use case here is for a live situation where the block is being played back by a media server and an actor interacts with a prop which “triggers” the “explosion” (produced by a series of interconnected envelope and math modifiers triggered by one exposed envelope modifier) effect so it’s a live follow-the-puck situation.
I’ve managed to work around it by modifying the explosion effect such that the period between waves is reduced so that there’s less slack/latency in triggering the effect. It isn’t 100% what I wanted as it means the terminal explosion effect uses several ripples instead of one big ripple but the trigger becomes useable that way in a real-time cueing situation.
I ended up “triggering” the amplitude of the explosion by programming different fade times using a media server connected to a lighting console, using the lighting console’s fade times.
I’ll have to wait until the episode is streaming until I can post any content related to it but the gag worked out.
