Heya,

I've had a slightly different POP workflow lately which I thought I might share. I think it's kinda cool; i've made a little OTL to demo the idea.

Essentially, it uses the POP PreRoll to make Pops live. Instead of setting a bunch of pop parmeters, and then pressing play and waiting for it to get to frame 200, etc, you can directly manipulate parameters and see the result - WYSIWYG. Forgive me if this is obvious to you..

Try out the attached OTL. Set your display to Frame 1 and play with the OTL parameters. The Live adjustments only happen on Frame 1. Also, there's a handle: press enter in the viewport to play with: Translate, Rotate, Scale. You can set up (“model”) the particle system, and then hit play. Eg. Make the box long and thin and move the arrows to all start at one end. Notice the bounces happening interactively!? See where this might go? …

Usually, i'm working in a Pop's pane and so the updates are immediate. I've noticed if you're displaying out at Object Level the pop-sop doesn't recook, so i've put a callback in the OTL parms to force it to cook. There's probably another way to do this. This ‘trick’ isn't needed if you're in Pops themselves.

It's a pretty simple demo. It might provide some ideas for a new way to work with Pops. I've been using a similar technique to interactively model clouds. Lots more params, but the feedback is immediate.

cheers,
ben.