Hi! I am trying to do a short animation of a ship landing on the moon and i want to create the sand blowing away when the rocket lands. I have been playing with the particle emitter and fountain but dont seem to get very food result. Do i need to use the physics model feature for this? Any advice from anyone? tks in advance.

hi PTNAA I have done a few animations with this type of effect. One easy way that I have found to do this is to use the shockwave emitter and set the maximum particle setting to 100000 your choice of speed. In the emitter properties window set you render size to .02 and turn off casts shadows. Add about 3% blur to the emitter. Test the color of the particles agents your ground cover color. You can play with the color and transparencies in the texture room. Set the object color for the emitter on the HLS color wheel with the H:0 L:19 S:0, Highlight set to 76%, Shin 3% reflect 14% and trans 82% If you have larger rocks close to the landing you can use the shake behavior in the modifiers pull down to make them move around. The last thing I add is the fog effect. Change it to a cylinder then tone it down to where you can barely see it and place it at the center of the emitter. Make sure to turn off casts shadows if you put the fog effect inside the particle emitter. I sometimes place two levels of fog one above the other with different colors. Time them to lead the particle emitter just ahead of the shockwave. I hope this helps you out with your animation. Message me anytime if you need help with this setup. glought

Great! Thanks for the tip!!