[Closed] the difference between particleTime &particleAge

The Particle Age channel contains the age of the particle. It is normally reset to 0 at birth and is incremented automatically as the particle lives in the flow. Of course, the value can be reset by another operator to make the particle appear “newborn” even if it is not, or set to higher value than 0 at birth, but these cases are exceptions to the rule.

The Particle Time channel is a more general-purpose time channel. You can set it to any time and it will increment the time as the particle lives just like the Age channel. Normally, you would set the time channel of a particle at its birth to the time of the birth, and an independent per-particle “clock” will tell you “how late is it” for each particle. This means that particles can have their own time independently of the event times which are based on the current time of evaluation. Of course, if you would set the ParticleTime to 0 at birth in a Birth Script operator, it would behave like the ParticleAge. But having two such channels lets you have independent values for age and for local current time.

Typically, when a particle passes a Test, the test time is set to the value in the particleTime channel and not the event’s current time. So each particle has its own clock ticking, and you can offset these clocks as you wish.

You can also store your own times in the channel, for example if you want to remember when something specific happened to a particle, you can set its particleTime channel to 0 at that point and later check whether enough time has passed since that event without touching the Age channel which is normally used to synchronize animation and events like death etc.

I would say you should post this question on the Particle Flow forums of Orbaz Tech – I am sure Oleg can explain the fine details behind these channels much better…