Hi guys,
Check out the attached scene - Stoke doesn’t emit correctly. It looks like it’s connected to the magmas on the PRTSurface distribution object not updating correctly.
Scene:
dropbox.com/s/9c2uk8o39kpnw … 1.zip?dl=0
Thanks!
The issue you are seeing is caused by the difference between Viewport particle display and Render Time particle display.
The same can happen with PFlow if you are not careful 
Both PRT Surface objects are set to 30% display. So the pattern on PRT Surf you see in the viewport is based off 30% of the Seeding points. However, when you simulate in Stoke, Stoke is forcing Render Mode (as if a renderer was fired), which causes the pattern it sees to be based on 100% seeding points, and the two are totally misaligned in time and space!
You have two options:
- Check the Stoke option “Emit From Viewport Particles” to match what you see in the viewport
- Change the Seeding PRT Surface to 100% viewport display. This will produce a different visible pattern in the viewport, but that would match what Stoke was simulating when “Emit From Viewport Particles” was unchecked!
To see it even better, I set the Life expectancy to only 1 frame, and disabled the Wind influence. Then I set the Stoke display to Velocities, with a Magma Color set to White-Color to invert the colors on the Stoke. I also tried “Use Seed Count As Rate” to emit exactly one Stoke particle per source particle.
This gave me a very clear display of the two matching perfectly when either the Viewport OR the Render settings were aligned…
P.S. I loved this setup! Good job!
Ah, nice! Didn’t look there because I totally didn’t expect it to also affect the timing 
Thanks!