Then, under Setup, press the Particle View button. When you open Particle View you'll get what's called a Standard Flow which is basically a list of controllers that control birth, position, speed, rotation and shape of the particles. You also have control over how the particles will be displayed in the viewport and during render. Near the bottom is a list over all available controllers (Fig.07).

We'll now start by adding one of our buildings to the scene.

Step 2.1: Birth

As we don't want buildings to pop out of the ground during animation, all particles should appear simultaneously. We'll therefore set Emit Start and Emit Stop to the same frame. I'll set both to -1 to make sure the buildings are in place before animation starts at frame 0. In my case I want 250 buildings and consequently set the Amount to 250 (Fig.08).

Step 2.2: Position

As you can see, this gives us 250 particles emitting from the PF Source icon (Fig.09).



To attach the particles to the plane instead, we'll need to replace Position Icon in the controllers list with something else called Position Object. To do this, find the Position Object controller in the list of available controllers and drag it on top of the Position Icon controller in the view above. Let go when a red line appears over the Position Icon, meaning it'll be replaced by what you're dragging in (Fig.10).


Having selected the newly created Position Object, you can now press the button called By List, under Emitter Objects, which brings up a window where you can select an Emitter Object. Choose the plane you created earlier called CityEmitter (Fig.11).


This randomly distributes the particles across the plane (Fig.12).