How to deform individual particles along the same curve guide that they are all traveling on?

Question

So basically I'm trying to achieve this

The particles I intend on using will be flat elongated planes that have enough subdivisions along the body allowing it to be deformed gracefully along the same path that has been set for all the particles to travel upon so as the particles travel they bend with this path fluidly.

Thanks in advance for you help.

Answer 1

That can be done using Animation Nodes.

The principle is to make a duplicate instance of an object for each particle.

This base object is associated to a curve modifier.

The tricky thing is that you can not place the duplicates at the particle position, because this will not fit with the modifier (we need to follow the curve axis specified on the modifier, but stay constant on the other axis).

So, we keep the particle position for the modifier axis only (here Z) and for the other axis (here X, Y) we take a constant random position.

Last part: we want a vector of random fixed positions for each particle but the particle life cycle varies. So we consider all particles from the beginning and hide the died one at the end.

• 1: Get the particle system considering alive and died
• 2: Instantiate a copy of the base object for each of them
• 3: Take random positions for X and Y but keep the particle Z
• 4: Get the dead particles amount
• 5: Place the objects
• 6: Hide the dead