This was my final project for ICS 369, which was made and rendered in Maya. The goal was to use Python to create and animate several particle systems in a ~30 second animation. This was achieved by using Maya’s script editor to create objects, set materials, set transforms, add keyframes, etc. For instance, the speed lines, asteroids, clouds, and trees are some of the particle systems that were made using a Python script. Other models, such as the UFO and cow, were manually created and animated.
ICS 369 was where I used scripts to animate for the first time. I also extensively utilized classes and first-class functions in my particle system script to have customizable emitters and forces. For instance, I can set the amount of objects an emitter emits per frame, how long it will emit for, what the particle’s polygon/model will be, the area that particles can spawn in, and so on.
Below is a snippet showing the emitter class and all the properties that can be set.
The entire script can be viewed in this gist