Maya Instancer

Shear: (vector)

This is pretty self explanatory. This is where you can tell Maya if you want it to shear any of your instanced geometry and shear direction. The default value is None, which results in a <<0,0,0>> shear value.

Visibility: (float)

Here is where you tell Maya how to handle the visibility of your instances. The default setting is None, which turns on the display of instances for all particles.

Object Index: (float)

If you set the Cycle option of the Instancer to None, this option determines which object from the Instanced Objects list is used for each particle. If you set Cycle to Sequence, ObjectIndex is ignored. The default setting is None, which sets the value to 0, causing the first object on the list to be used for all particle instances because the index list is a 0-based array.

Click here for an example usage of instancing geometry onto particles.

Rotation Type: (float)

This selection tells Maya which of the following 3 inputs to use for instance object rotation. You can only use one at a time and Maya uses whichever is the first in the list. This means if you have input value for Rotation and AimPosition, Maya will use Rotation. If you have AimDirection and AimPosition, Maya will use AimDirection. The default value is None, which will result in Maya using Rotation.

However, if you want to randomly use all 3 you can write a custom float attribute for this. Note that value for Rotation is 0, AimDirection is 1, and AimPosition is 2. So if you were to create a custom expression like custom_rotation and write the following creation expression: particleShape.custom_rotation = rand(3); then assign this attribute from the pull-down you would get some objects using Rotation, some using AimDirection, and some using AimPosition as their rotation type.