Summary

Particles and dynamics offer complex and realistic animation capabilities that can often make the animation process 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 potential applications, such as 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 the dynamics aren't calculated again.

• Creating particle emitters You learned how to create different 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 give an object softness so that its surface area automatically deforms when it interacts with other objects and particles included in the dynamics simulation.