I hate the Max particle scale by age system

[lordraidis]

So I've been digging around trying to find an alternative system in Max to scale particle sprites based on their age--similar to the way Maya does it with a simple black and white gradient. It's so easy. No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to get used to the strange keyframing system in Max where you keyframe the scale on the timeline ahead of time... so confusing and unintuitive. Has anyone here ever found an alternative way to do this? Like a simple scale by gradient system?

[krueger_1]

I'm not aware of any direct way of using a gradient for scale. I'm not sure Max can even read a gradient translating to time. It's not that difficult to use the scale though.

If you sync by abosulte time, it will animate every particle on the frames that you've keyframed. ie: If you have a key on frame 20 and another on frame 40, all particles will animate scale in unison from 20-40.

If you sync by particle age or event age, frame 0 becomes the starting point for each particle's scale animation. ie: If you have the same 20-40 keyframe animation and set to sync by event age, each particle's scale will start to animate 21 frames after they enter the event.

[lordraidis]

Yeah from what I'm gathering from everything I've read so far, this method (aside from creating a complex script which I have no real ability to do) is the only way to do this. Guess I just better suck it up get used to it 🙂 heh