Maximilian Schönherr Shows How to Create an Interaction Between Particles and Cloth, Having Particles Deform a Surface.

There was a time in Maya’s history where dynamics were smaller entities that could work together but didn’t really work well together. That all changed when soft and rigid body dynamics were deprecated in favor of Nucleus, a unified solver for all elements. The nucleus is the “n” in nParticles and nCloth, which means that they can interact with each other. Uhr (Maximilian Schönherr) shows how those two entities can work well with each other, by showing how to have particles deform a surface in Maya.

Schönherr walks through creating a system where raining nParticles can affect the surface of a nCloth object, deforming it as they collide. Having particles deform a surface like this is a great way to make realistic rain simulations or other scenarios where animations would be difficult any other way. Not to mention that dynamic interactions are always pretty fun to play with.