Is this possible in any way? I wanted to generate some fluid shapes, so I set up a particle generator with the metaball particle. What I can't seem to do is "freeze" it into an editable mesh. Although I can "convert deformed object to mesh" what I get is the spherical particles -- not their metaball fusion. Any ideas?

I haven't found a way to make that one work either, instead, resorting to animating metaball objects directly. Mark

Hrm. I miss the old Bryce "randomize" function!

Another mildly interesting discovery. Textures do not "scale" on a metaball fountain. That is to say, no matter what scaling you place into a procedural (I was experimenting with the Cellular shader, and several of the Shader Ops plug-ins for even more scaling control) the only scaling change you can enact is by changing the size of the particle generator itself. This is with "local" switched on in the particle generator settings. With the other mapping option selected, even re-scaling the generator does not change the relative scale of the texture applied to the final metaball shape.

I remember reading something about that a loooooooong time ago from Antoine. He said the Metaballs do not use UV coordinates in the normal way. In fact, while cool, there is nothing normal about metaballs as they relate to the rest of Carrara. :)

Ah, well. I hadn't meant to waste a day on Metaball Lab. What I was doing, was trying to find a cheap-and-dirty way to knock up an alien landscape. I figured several squat metaball fountains with a nice organo-metal texture on them would look pretty cool. Still might work....but with all those extra floating balls will be a little more Kirby-esque. Except I also made another interesting little discovery. There's no access to the "seed" for a particle generator. Every run is identical. Fortunately the answer is relatively simple; run your duplicate fountains for as long again as the first run (so as to get into a "fresh" section of stream.) Ooops. Another little note. While I was playing with more than one particle generator in a single scene Carrara locked up twice. So that did dissuade me from two many more experiments. To be honest, tho....this set was done on Carrara 4, which is still installed on my Powerbook.

I kind of forgot if V4 has it but in V5 there is a shuffle button which alters the seed; you just can't set your own seed values, though.

Aha. Yeah, I got a "shuffle" button in 4 as well. Put this in the list of "undocumented and/or inconsistent features," tho. I assumed it "shuffled" the user-entered values -- like most other uses of a "shuffle" button do. But now you got me thinking. Given the "random object" function in the particle generator, and throw in a few splines, and you could SO make a Jack Kirby-style "Doctor Strange" scene....

Oh, yea!