tyActor particle rotation

[moonjam]

I have a setup where I am filtering the members of a tyActor using tyProperties modifiers, assigning Custom Floats and then using property test to send them out to different events. Everything's been working wonderfully, however I wondered if it would be possible to rotate the individual tyActor particles and I don't seem to be able to get this to work.

I've had some luck using a Rotation operator with Look-at and unchecking 'Affect particle shape orientation', and when I move the orientation target in the viewport everything looks perfect. However as soon as I push play they go nuts. I'm guessing this is something to do with the way the transforms on the individual tyActor particles are calculated affecting how the Rotation operator works on them in isolation (which makes sense) but I just want to check in to see if what I'm attempting to do could be possible and if so what might be the best approach?

Basically, I'm trying to achieve an effect where the tyActors are like satellite dishes but I'm able to orient the dish sections separately from the main Actor. Using a Rotation operator with Look-at on the Actors as a whole works perfectly, it's only when I attempt to filter the separate parts that there's an issue.

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Here's the scene file
  tyFlow_ActorLookat_max2022.max (Size: 692 KB / Downloads: 100)

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Here's a video if it helps! https://vimeo.com/677215336/99faab2be6

[tyFlow]

Hey,

Couple of things:

In your Actor operator, enable "exclude from animation". When that's checked, the actor particle transforms won't be returned to their default 'idle' animation state at the end of the timestep.

Then in your Rotation operator, you accidentally unchecked 'affect particle shape orientation'....so you're rotating the particle pivots but not the mesh.

Once you do that, you'll get the result you expect.

[moonjam]

Ahhh, that's perfect. Thank you so much Tyson!