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A hair particle system is used to emit leaves from an animated tree, for some reason the leaves rotate. How can this be stopped? I know that I could convert the particles to meshes, but I would prefer too keep the particles.
Two subsequent frames:
The settings:
Emit from faces instead of vertices makes it appear a bit more stable (but then no more particles will be emitted at the tips of the branches), not all leaves are rotating.
This sudden odd orientation change appears to be caused by the Armature modifier on the tree. The particles seem to respond much differently when the vertex positions are moving (it could possibly be because it is changing the size of the faces).
One way to combat this would be to move the perticle systems up the modifier stack until they are before the Armature modifier.
So instead of this:
You would instead end up with this:
It is important to note that when the armature moves the mesh, the particles might not move with it. You will need to convert to a mesh and add it to the armature deformation.
I found a way to keep the unconverted particle system by enabling rotation and setting the initial orientation to normal (The conversion to mesh brought some performance issues).
When rotation is unchecked again, the emitted leaves don't start to rotate again. It seems that Blender (v2.71) does some initialization here which is not done otherwise.
