Summary

Particles and dynamics offer complex and realistic animation capabilities that can often make the task of creating an animation much easier. This chapter's tutorials have only touched on some of the possibilities available with particles and dynamics, but they point the way to some of the potential applications, such as hoses spraying any type of object, rain and snow effects, crash simulations, waterfalls, and so on. Some of the concepts and techniques you've learned include the following:

• Creating rigid-body dynamics You learned how to set up and animate a dynamics system of non-deformable objects.

• Caching dynamics animation When the dynamics simulation has played through once, you learned how to set Maya to remember the animation and play it back without recalculating.

• Baking the animation After you have the animation playing the way you like, you can turn the motions into keyframes so that dynamics will not be calculated again.

• Creating particle emitters You learned how to create the various types of particle emitters, and how to turn objects into particle emitters.

• Creating fields You learned how to apply forces such as gravity to your particles and dynamics objects.

• Creating soft-body dynamics You learned how to turn an object into a deformable object that interacts with particles and/or other objects.