Maya expressions and dynamics is great. We can produce some cool special effects using maya.

Now we are going to reproduce some of the logo effect of the film "Matrix" using maya particles and expressions.Now let us begin.

First we need to create all the 26 letters ,from "a" to "z". Creat----text, open the option ,set the text type to poly. Type "abcd.......xyz" in the text box. Press "Create".



Now you have all the letters you want.Open the outline window, you can find that maya has create two groups. One contains all the curve of the letters and another contains the 26 mesh objects. Delete the group contains all the curve. Here we need only the group contains all the polygon letters.


Now we need to write a script to rename all the polygen letters to names that are easy for later use.use the script below to rename all the letters. Of course you can rename them by hand. ( I am not sure the script is optimised, maybe you can write one better, but this one really dose the work).

int $i;
string $t="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
string $cmd="rename Trim_Char_";
for($i=1;$i<=26;$i++)
{string $temp;
$temp=eval("substring "+$t+" "+$i+" "+$i);
print($temp);
eval($cmd+$temp+"_1_1 "+"text"+$i);
};

type the script in your script editor and execute it.Now your outline window should show this.




now select all the polygon letters and Center pivot, translate to abs(0,0,0), then freezetransform. Then hide all of them.

Create a 10*20 nurbs plane. Select the plane and add a particle emitter to it.The emitter type is set to surface. Rotate the plane 180 degrees along z axis. Set the speed of the emission to about 15. emitter rate to 0.2 .


Now we will add one attribute to the particleshape node .
Select particleshape1, open the attribute editor. click the "general" under "add dynamic attributes"section. Add a new attribute named "index" and set the attribute type to "Array".