Autodesk’s Daryl Obert demonstrates how you are able to use Maya’s nParticle System to create a missile trail using the Thick Cloud particle type which in essence uses a Fluid Shape in Maya to facilitate the volumetric effect. Daryl shows how you are able to modify the fluids appearance by passing attributes from the Maya nParticle System to the fluids by way of a particle sampler info node in Maya.

in this demo we are going to be looking at how we can use an nParticle System to generate a missile trail

As a result of emitting only a few nParticles, they each look like a little puff ball and lack randomness in their appearance, so Daryl shows off some new attributes added to the nParticle system that will allow you to calculate rotation based on collision to modify the missile trail into something more believable.

Here, Daryl shows how you are able to pass the emitting nParticle group’s rotatePP attribute over to the Maya Fluid’s texture attribute. in order to get that data into a format that the particle sampler info node can pass into the Fluid texture rotation value.