Problem with animating a Matrix style bullet

[Tomlaut]

Well Im trying to animate a bullet which got those "gas rings" flying behind as seen in the Matrix movies.
Well Im doing the Realflow basic Tutorials at the moment and everything works fine. Now I try to import everything back to Maya in order to render the scene.
The animation of the rings works fine , but the bullet is not moving because I reimported it.
Well since I got the "gas ring" mesh from Realflow is there a way to connect those with the bullet , so that the "gas mesh" is pushing the bullet forward?
Do I need to add any Dynamics again? Well im quite confused now and lost in the Maya menu :confused:

[DjVoyager]

Since you're on the Maya forum, let's see how the matrix bullet effect can be pulled in this app. First of all, there are couple of ways of creating the matrix bullet effect, using different techniques. Expressions and MEL scripts are commonly used. I for one am not into MEL and programming so this is how I do it:

1. Create your bullet. Doesn't matter what primitive.
2. Create couple of Nurbs spheres.
3. Flatten the spheres.
4. Now scale one of the spheres to the proportions of the bullet's base.
5. Scale the rest of the flattened spheres and place them like the image below (doesn't matter where they are in the scene because we'll hide them).
6. Group all of these spheres and name the group trail.
7. create a directional emitter: Rate (particles/sec) = 4
8. Place the emitter at the bottom of the bullet.
9. Parent the emitter to the bullet.
10. Animate the bullet (make sure the emitter moves with it)
11. Play to see if the particles are going in the direction where you want them to go.
12. Now select the trail group and the particles.
13. Go to Particles > Instancer (Replacement).
Play your scene, the bullet emits flattened spheres as we positioned them, like a trail behind it.
Apply a water material with refraction to the trail group's spheres and then hide them.
Hope that helps.

P.S: The advantage of this technique is that if you animate the trail group after applying the instancer, it will take effect on the bullet trail, for example re-scaling, rotating etc, which is awesome.

[Tomlaut]

Cool thanks for the quick help, I will try that method too
But I actually already got those bullet rings as Polygon mesh and they animate correctly.
But the bullet doesnt animate together with those rings, it just keeps steady.
As you can see from the following image the bullet stays on the same position while the rings move from left to right.
http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/3787/bulletpw1.th.jpg (http://img152.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bulletpw1.jpg)
I tried to use "make collide" in Dynamics but that didnt do anything and just moving the bullet from left to right and setting a key frame doesnt work either, because the rings start slowly and then increase in speed.
is there a different way to connect the rings to the bullet, well let the rings do the pushing? Or is that too complicated :dont_know

[DjVoyager]

The direction seems to be off. Is your emitter Directional? Use that and then see what axis your bullet is moving on, and put that direction in the emitter's axis, like if your bullet is going on z axis, you will put a 1 in DirectionZ and 0 in DirectionX and DirectionY.

[DjVoyager]

By the way, make sure your emitter is at the bottom of the bullet and parented to it, so that when you select the bullet the emitter also gets selected. Do this before you animate.