Do Particles Remember?

[JonathanE]

While working on the Fountain exercise (making 5 of them) I noticed something odd - by doing a Clone Hierarchy and shifting the master null (of a Parent Emitter with 2 Child Emitters) along the X Axis, the Child Emitter Particles end up shifting away from the X axis origin.
If I set up other (hierarchy clones) on the other side they also tend to be biased away from the (unaffected) Parent emitter away from the origin. The amount appears to be proportional to the distance.

Not sure if this is something expected (and explained by Tim later), a known issue with Particles, or if something odd has occurred with how I set up and cloned the particles.

Any thoughts?

[JonathanE]

Okay, I found out why.

Whenever I do a Parent-Emitter and offset the "parent" the child particles act as if they are moving away from the origin. The farther the Parent is, the more they move away.

The Motion (Tab) Velocity was 100%, and (I guess) the particles used the offset from the origin (of the parent) as an offset to determine initial velocity [ even though the parent keyframe was offset at frame 0 and, I think, should make the childs velocity zero ].

When the velocity, for the child, is set to 0%, the particles behave properly.

Here is an image of my original problem