particle balloon question

[jamination]

I would like a balloon particle (easy enough) and a strand that flows along behind it, I have been able to do this by copying the ballon particle and then changing its particle type to strands plus a few more strand nodes. However, I would to refine this so it is in one point cloud or the strand point cloud more or less mirrors the balloon cloud (particle count does not need to be updated when the balloon particle count is updated if you know what I mean).

any suggestions.

[Matic]

I would like a balloon particle (easy enough) and a strand that flows along behind it, I have been able to do this by copying the ballon particle and then changing its particle type to strands plus a few more strand nodes. However, I would to refine this so it is in one point cloud or the strand point cloud more or less mirrors the balloon cloud (particle count does not need to be updated when the balloon particle count is updated if you know what I mean).

any suggestions.

If I get what you're saying you have 2 clouds, one for balloons, one for strands, and they "match" because you are using the exact same settings and seeds... and because of this, whenever you change the balloon animation, you have to make the same changes in the string cloud so they match. Eeew.

If so, the much simpler thing to do is to clone the points of your balloon cloud into a modeling ice tree of your strand cloud - you then have one particle for every balloon particle, doing whatever the balloon particle does. You then override the particle values you don't want and make/simulate strands as needed. You will see a "ghost" tree in your balloon stack that shows the point your particles are cloned - move it to be above all the other trees and you clone the result of everything that happens in your balloon setup.

You could alternatively use a simpler approach and just make an "add point" node,and feed it all the point positions of your balloon sim to create a particle at every position and go from there. Either way, any changes you make to the balloon sim (like numbers of particles, their movements etc) carry over to your strand simulation.

I hope that's what you were looking for.