We seek to develop a simple, user friendly generator for particle effects/emission.  The ultimate goal is the user this system to generate rain effects for our short; however, we hope that we make our tool general enough to make it useful in several different alternative contexts (such as water being sprayed out of a hose or smoke out of a tailpipe) and make it applicable in non-standard physical situations.  

When we first sat down to develop our tool, we listed several different attributes we thought our rain generator should have.  Every time we thought we finalized our list, something else came to mind.  For example, what if we want to simulate a heavy wind?  What happens in a situation in which the animator wants the rain to fall upward or sideways?  What happens if we want the drops to add to a puddle?  It became clear that developing a more general tool was necessary.

The primary focus of our approach will allowing for scripting of many different forces and properties to be added into either particle expressions or with Maya’s existing force system.  We will provide some sample ones (such as gravity and wind), but our system will be generic enough to allow for adding forces and equations which we have not thought of.  This is achieved by a Python script which will automatically generate the UI elements for additional scripts the user authors.

-NURBS Geometry to Emit From
-A Texture Potential For Emission
-Geometry To Collide With
-Rain Material
-Force Scripts and Force Script Parameters

-Particle Systems/Emitters
-Collision Behavior
-Control Expressions
-Render Layers
-Background Shaders Attached To Normal Geometry

VISUAL TARGET/FINAL UI COMPARISON