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I'm using an emission particle system to create a forest. For the most part it's working fine without problems. But I do have a little problem. Some of my trees tend to float over the plane rather than coming straight from the face. Here's an image of what I mean. enter image description here

I'm using an emission particle system Here's my settings. enter image description here

I'd just like the trunks of the trees to come straight from the faces of the plane, and not have some of them float above.

I'm using cycles if that's actually necessary.

EDIT

This is what it looks like if I change from grid to random or jittered. enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ Do you have any other modifiers on the object? If so, does checking use modifier stack help? $\endgroup$
    – PGmath
    Jan 19, 2015 at 0:52
  • $\begingroup$ I did have a modifier, but checking the use modifier stack did not help. Neither did applying the modifiers. $\endgroup$
    – Axi0m
    Jan 19, 2015 at 0:55
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    $\begingroup$ How about changing from grid to random or jittered distribution? $\endgroup$
    – PGmath
    Jan 19, 2015 at 1:02
  • $\begingroup$ If I do that, the trees end up on their side like the picture I'm adding in. $\endgroup$
    – Axi0m
    Jan 19, 2015 at 1:14
  • $\begingroup$ Actually, I just did that and changed the rotation to "Global X" and everything worked. Thanks a lot for the help, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the particle systems. $\endgroup$
    – Axi0m
    Jan 19, 2015 at 1:15

1 Answer 1

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When you are planning to make those kinds of particle systems, you should use a Hair system instead of an Emitter one.

In your system the particles are being thrown from the faces and, despite you have the system freezed at frame 0 (I think Blender don't use negative frames in any simulation), it looks like some particles had enough velocity to be outside of the faces.

So the best approach to achieve your work is using a Hair Particle System. It's very simple for your purpose:

  1. Create a Particle System and set it to Hair. The Hair strands are perpendicular to the surface, just what you want.
  2. Change the Number of particles. The Hair Length is not necessary for you.
  3. Under the Render properties of the particle system, select object and then set Dupli Object to your tree. Then change the size at your will.
  4. Maybe you need to re-orient your tree in Edit Mode to align the vertical axis.

Additionally, you can create a group of a few different trees and set the Render particles to Group. The particle system is going to randomly select the trees for every strand.

Regarding to your actual situation, maybe if you set the Normal Velocity to 0, those trees would not float. But the Hair System is the best choice in this case.

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