Are You Ready? New C4D 2024.4 Particle System - Lets try it out!

Maxon recently announced the April release of Cinema 4D so it's 20244 is the addition with that release they've made some exciting announcements about the particle system so you've probably seen some of the videos that are out there some of the previews uh the particle system has gotten a robust update and it's pretty darn cool I am an X particles uh user I use x particles in almost every project I work with but I'm really excited now to see sort of how their particle system Compares and I'm excited about the fact that they've built in so many features uh and it's going to continue to grow I'm sure so rather than just spend time talking about their particle system uh I thought I'd actually try to make something for you and something caught my eye in their uh preview so we're here on a Cinema 4D website on Max on.net and if you you can watch the preview to show all of the new features but if you scroll down to what's new and watch this little video uh I turn the sound off here there was one particular thing that kind of caught my eye that I wanted to focus on today and that is growing mold so I'm going to go ahead and come out here a little bit further and take a look here so this next piece is uh pretty fantastic right it's a really short clip and so I'm going to go ahead and let it play and then rewind and step through it a little bit more slowly so I was really excited to see this this piece by Scott Frizzle is showing kind of mold growing on an orange so today I thought I would try to reproduce at least portions of this this using the new particle system so let's take a look and see what we can do rather than using orange I thought today I'm going to use an onions just so it looks a little bit different and in the models section of Cinema 4D uh under food we've got apples and ketchup and onions and so I'm going to use this cut onion uh I think the white onion will do us the best so I'm going to go ahead and take this white onion and add it into my scene now the first thing I want to do before I uh continue on is work out my scale because the simulation in cinema 40 is really dependent on scale it works kind of more realistically with with scale being appropriate and so I want to go ahead and create a a model of a figure and I'm going to take the onion and I'm going to scale it up so that it looks like a reasonably sized onion for this figure right so let's just go ahead and scale it it's a big onion okay so we're going to say this is a large onion and it's cut in half and now I can get rid of my figure and I've got an onion that is scaled reasonably the next thing I want to do is make sure I have enough polygons to work with so if I hit NB you can see that there it's nice it's a good model uh well designed but it could use some more polygonal structure uh part of the thing that we're going to do with the um mold growth is going to be Reliance on the actual polygons right so it's going to grow on each other polygon so we need to have something that's pretty dense for it to work appropriately and so this is set up already so that it's in the subdivision surface so all I really have to do is increase the number of subdivisions and the render and editor uh and I'm going to do it uh to three in both cases and go ahead and hit C on my keyboard and that's going to make this an editable model now um and and we should be good to go from that point so uh I'll hit na now so we can see our model again and I'll just go ahead and add these roots in as a child of onion cuts and drag it down so I'm only working with this and that way I can get rid of all these other uh components so I just have a model to work with the next thing I want to do is go ahead and set up my particle system so let's just take a quick look at what we've got though before we dive in so um the lovely people at Maxon have given us some example scenes so if you come out to uh all here and look at example scenes and scroll down to Features you'll see a particles section and in here you can scroll through and see all of the example scenes that they've set up which give you different kind of particle simulation settings right so you got abstract flames and youve got arrows coming in and sort of curly noise and branching and things breaking and shattering and bugs and populations and surface crawling and you know dissolving models and Logo things so glittery dust logo uh dissolves so lots of wonderful examples to work with but I didn't see anything like the mold growth that I was looking for so I felt like I was kind of on my own so let's uh see what we can do but great starting point also they've given you a great help feature so if you come into the help menu and just type in particles you're going to find intro to particle simulation and this page gives you a really in-depth overview of how the particle simulation system works gives you example scenes that you can work with um and kind of gives you stepbystep handholding on how to work with this new system so I recommend you dive in and take a look there I've only I haven't get gotten into a lot of it I just kind of wanted to work through uh one project and see how I felt about it um so I'm going to go ahead and create a new uh system now I've got that particle simulation system docked over here so it comes in right here under simulate you can undock that menu and just like pull it over here and attach it uh and now I have all of the new particles information and the old particle information available to me we want to start with an emitter now they have the basic emitter like they've always had right and you might notice something new here so this is the basic emitter it takes a second to play once you start add an emitter for some reason I guess the system's a little bit more complicated so this looks like our old particle like basic particle emitter that we had before but you might notice it came in with this particle group so that's something that's new with this system every single emitter that you create comes with a particle group so the emitter controls things you might expect like how many things it's creating how big it is what type of shape it is uh you can do shot constant pulses um you can change the seed random seed you can come into the properties change the lifetime you can reassign the group to a different one you can change the speed the directionality alignment color radius all these kinds of things exist in the properties uh section and then the particle group controls things like how does it look so these are the dots that it's creating right now we can draw the radius of those dots so it's more circular it's actually showing us the size of the particle or you could change it to arrows ticks lines or handles um and then you can change the actual size as well so I can change these up to something like five right so now they're much larger the dots are going to going to be larger the arrows are going to be larger so this is all to help you with visualization um and actually what would happen if we rendered these right now so the partic this is something that's nice the particles are set up to render by default in red shift without doing anything right so if I start my IPR now I'm going to get particles which is something that I've never seen before you always have to do something to get the particles to render so this is kind of a nice feature you can visualize your simulations right away now the actual size of the particles you might notice is not the same as what the draw feature is telling me the actual size of the particles is controlled by this radius feature so they are 1 cm if I change these to 0.5 and create new particles the new ones are going to be 0.5 CM so just keep in mind that there is a difference between the visualization feature in the particle group and the actual radius in the particle emitter the particle group also contains uh information about the cache so once you've done your particle simulation you can cache the entire simul simulation so nice feature as well okay so I'm going to delete this particle group and this particle emitter and what I want to do is use one of these other emitters so this is new right so before all we had is an emitter now we have a mesh emitter we've got a spline emitter and the reproduced emitter mesh emitter self-explanatory right it emits particles from a mesh object spline emits particles from a spline reproduce actually emits particles uh it's kind of like the mograph of particle emitters so it duplicates what other emitters are doing uh so that one's one I'm I'm excited to dive into and learn more about but for this project right now we're going to use this a mesh emitter and that mesh emitter has got its own particle group I'm going to call this onion emitter and I'm going to call this onion group and that way I know exactly what's going on and if I had multiple emitters in My Scene It would be pretty clear so what I want to do is tell this um onion emitter to emit particles on this onion and so in the onion emitter under emission for geometry I want to include onion cut and now that I've done that uh my onion emitter is I'll turn off my rendering is emitting particles directly from the surface of my onion if I increase the raate to something like a th000 you'll see that it's emitting lots of particles if I come into the particle properties and turn the speed down to something like one you'll see that it's just continuously emitting particles from the surface of this onion so pretty fantastic um I'm actually going to turn my speed down to zero so that the particles just kind of sit there on the surface and I'll go ahead and leave it right there for now um I'm I am going to increase the size of the draw of my dots um and show the radius so you can see the radius in comparison to my onion is pretty huge and so I want to come into my mitter under radius and I'm going to change this down to something like 0.1 right so now we have smaller particles beinged produced on that surface and we're going to go even smaller uh in a moment but for now this will be just fine this radius value actually gives you uh variance as well so I could do 0.1 and I can vary vary that um radius by a percentage but or not a percentage but by a uh measurement so if I did 0.05 we're going to have bigger and smaller ones that are 0.005 different from 0.1 so now when if I were to do a IPR render here you're going to notice that those particles that it's created are indeed represented by that circular outline size that we saw so good start we've got particles doesn't look like mold yet um how do we control the mold starting in a point and then growing over a surface and having a little bit of variability like we saw in the orange here well this is how I would go about it we're going to use a series of vertex colors and vertex color maps to control where the particles are being placed on the onion and so the first thing I need is to go into tags and I'm going to go to um other tags and create vertex color we'll drag that over here to the end and I don't need to do anything with that at all I just need to leave it there uh and then I'm going to say let's go ahead and turn off our IPR now I'm going to go up to tags other tags and create a Vertex map this vertex map will control where particles will be placed and so I'm going to go ahead and drag that one over here and I'm going to rename this to vertex map we we'll call this one vertex map a and in this vertex map I want to change this to use transfer and that doesn't mean mediately going to bring us into our Fields section it comes in with freeze on here I'm just going to delete that and what I want to do is add in a circular field and I'm sorry a spherical field and now this spherical field is going to be controlling uh where yellow is is going to be where our particles are going to be uh the largest so I'm going to go ahead and bring this down make it smaller going to make a decision about where our want this mold to begin growing I think we'll start like right here on this corner and so what I want to do is place this right there on that corner and make it pretty small and move it over something like that so essentially the size of this spherical uh field is going to control where our mold is going to be so as it grows over time as we animate the size of it our mold is going to grow all right so I also want to add a little bit of variability in there so some Randomness or some noise and to do that I'm going to add a Shader field so if you go into the fields here and type in add in a Shader field that'll add that into our group and under the Shader field I'm going to come down uh choose a noise for my Shader and we'll play around with the type of noise and the scale of that noise let's do something like um blister turbulent and let's turn down the scale so I love how you can sort of see this real time I'm also going to come in and change some of the clipping right so I want to kind of make it a little bit more contrasty so I'm just bringing the low clip and the high clip a little closer together so we have some sort of dead spots so red is where it won't happen and um yellow is where it will happen and I feel like this feels like an organic shape you can always come in and play with your scale at any time I felt like right there was pretty nice and so I'm going to go ahead and leave that and what I'll do is go back up to my fields in my vertex map and I'm going to change this one to Overlay and what that does is as I scale this up you're going to see that the edges are showing me that sort of more organic appearance where things are growing and not growing right so this mold's going to grow out over time and uh we'll have a little bit of that sort of more organic feel just moving this up a little bit to this corner kind of want them to start at a spot that's really small so while we while we've got this in place and it's working uh we've got our uh Fields working let's go ahead and animate this so let's give ourselves like I don't know 300 frames or something and I'll start off really small so let's look at the spherical field and we'll say zero and then over time let's say over 200 frames I'm going to grow it so I can just scale it up right here and go ahead and key frame that okay so our particles are still being made they're not listening to us yet but you can see how that mold growth is going to feel um so that's pretty nice I'm pretty happy with the way that feels what I also want to have happen is I don't want the center to remain there right so if I'm going to produce particles on a surface and the particles are going to produce everywhere this is yellow and they're going to continually produce right so it's going to keep producing particles I don't want particles gr on top of particles on top of particles what I want to have happen is a a radius appear and then disappear so the particles are produced and they grow out and it produces more on the outside and then it disapp disappears at the end so that's kind of what I'm going for right now and to do that I want to add a remap right so I'm G to I'm going to actually add a new vertex uh map on here I'm going to select my go to other tags and say vertex map we'll put it over here at the end we'll call this vertex map B you can call it whatever you want of course and in this vertex map I'll say use transfer again I'll delete the freeze again and I'm going to drag in my vertex map a so vertex map a is copied in here it looks exactly like it has before but what I'm going to do differently now is I'm going to go go ahead and come up later in my timeline so that I see more of a larger radius and here I'm going to add in under clamp here we're going to add in a remap and this remap function is going to allow us to control using uh a spline how this is functioning so Contour mode I'm going to change to curve and then this is the curve that it's using right now what I want to do is grab this pull it down control click in the center and bring in another curve right so this is creating this nice radius uh so what's going to happen now is as we come in it's going to start with this radius being pretty with this area being a ring and it's going to grow this ring out as we go and then we should be able to control the fading out at the end by animating this multiplier component so it's pretty simple to use so this is what we've got right now we've got this ring that grows out particles and the particles get bigger and bigger and bigger and or the area grows grows and grows and grows as soon as this hits 200 I want to quickly fade it away so at 200 I'm going to come come back into this vertex map and in the remap section down at the bottom I'm going to animate this multiplier and over let's say maybe 40 frames or so we're going to go ahead and just animate this down to zero and let's see how that looks now so nice I think that's looking really cool we may want to change some things in in a moment but we'll see how it goes uh let's uh get this working further so I still I still don't have any way right now to tell the onion emitter to emit along those areas right so in my emitter I do have this option to add in a restriction right so this is where we're going to add in a uh polygon tag tag uh selection tag so what I want to do is come into my um object just click on any of it hit control a select all of them I'm going to say select store selection and we'll call this polygon selection uh we'll call this mold growth area and I want to click on use transfer and it's set up automatically to use fields and everything um and what I want to do is in its section down here for transfer I want to delete freeze and I want to add in my second vertex map vertex map B and now vertex map B is going to be a selection uh map that's controlled by the vertex colors that we just created and so now what happens is in my onion emitter I'm going to drag in this selection tag and if all has gone well what we should see is particles beginning to emit here and then emitting in a wave over time and then no longer emitting and that's exactly what's happening right so we've got a great first step right so we've got our particles emitting where we want them to if I do like a quick IPR you can see that those particles are emitting over time uh we've got a kind of a concentration in the center of it's growing and then we've got this outer concentration on the edges and it's got sort of an organic shape on the outside I'm going to go ahead and increase my emitter uh rate to 2,000 and so now we've got more particles being emitted at a more rapid rate and you may have to change that over time you know you may have to make it slower whatever uh to make it do what you want it to do now that I'm looking at this I kind of want to have that fade away happen at the same time uh and so I think I'm going to do a little bit of overlapping in those key frames so I'm just popping open my dope sheet really quick and under this Fields remap let's go ahead and zoom out I'm just going to have these overlap so the f remap is going to overlap at the end there so they're going to emit particles and it's going to fade out at that time so we can see it happening here it's growing but it's fading out as it gets to the end right so I kind of like the way that feels a little better let's see how that looks when we play it excellent I'm going to up increase this to 4,000 I want lots of particles to be be uh being produced right now it's really growing tons of particles as it goes along that's excellent all right I'm pretty happy with the way that's working yeah so we've essentially coated this onion entirely by these part articles and so now we need to figure out how can we change the color and all of that over time so that we get the white growth on the areas can we change the size over time yes we can so luckily there are some really nice things built in um that allow us to do that okay so let's work on that size change over time I'll go ahead and pull my dope sheet back down I'll go ahead and turn off my render settings and let's add in a couple of things so one thing I want to add in so the first thing I want to do is have my particles grow from a very tiny point to being larger over time rather than them just appearing right like popping into place as they're grown I want them to scale to do that we can use a data mapper right so under the color mapper option here there are all these different things now we can have look and spin and blend and flock and Predator play things and collisions uh pyro adve that works with the Pyro system with particles but we're going to do simple stuff first we're going to do data mapper this needs to be a child of the onion group or of the P particle group that you want to affect so any kind of components that you're putting in here to manipulate the particles need to be manipulating that particle emitters specific group and so the data mapper comes in right right now defaulting on age and that's what we want to use uh I'm going to do something like over a number of frames go from this size to this size and so on the age section I'm going to say from 0 to 100 frames I want you to go from and I'm going to change this from position to radius right so you've got all these different options in here distance Traverse lifetime angular velocity speed I'm going to use radius and I'm going to say over the time I want you to go from uh 0.1 on the well I think our particle size right now is what 0.1 so our particle properties radius is 0.1 so let's say 0 1 to 0.1 is going to be our Dimensions so we're going to say 01 to 0.1 that'll be our radius change and right now it's not going to work exactly the way we want it to because we've got this bell curve in here so what I really want to do is kind of delete this end in the bell curve and just pull this top one over and hold down shift so I want this to ease in and out over time so you can think of this bottom left one is zero and it is and this top right one is 0.1 or this bottom left one is actually 01 and this top right one is 0.1 let's see if that's working and we'll zoom in and it is right so now that we've set that up you can see the particles that are being created on the outside edge first are smaller than the particles being created uh that have been created earlier so over time right now these particles are starting off at little as little pin head tiny points and they're growing and this is something that was much harder to do with the previous system so that already feels pretty organic and let's go ahead and back this up and render a little bit just this segment and see what it looks like so nice you can see and you can see how quickly this stuff is processing right so uh using the GPU it is calculating all these particles so quickly it's really nice so we've got this mold system kind of growing out from the edge I think I'm liking the way this feels um yeah I am I'm liking I think I'm liking the way this feels so we're going to go ahead and keep it that way so that's one thing next thing we want to do is kind of change that color right so I'm going to add another mapper and this time we actually are going to use the color mapper and the color mapper also needs to be a child of the onion group of the particle group you're working with and we're going to use age to control the color and over time I want to go from let's just say uh the same number of frames 100 we want to go from zero which is the left to 100 which is the right if I don't change anything right now our particles are going to go from red to blue over 100 frames as they're grown and so I'm playing through a little B so you can see that they're starting off red in the center let's go ahead and turn off the IPR so we can see it growing so they're red in the center and they're turning to Blue On The Edge right so if I want to get that green white to Green sort of feel all I have to do is change my uh colors and it's kind of like a grayish nasty blue green right so almost like a sickly teal gray that looks pretty good and you can decide using the knot how quickly you want it to do that and let's see how that feels so pretty great we've got our particles growing uh and that is looking already a lot like mold I think I'm going to make a choice here and I'm going to say Do not uh be so so small at the start so I'm going to come back into the data mapper and I'm going to have it kind of quickly get up here so I'm actually going to just pull this over so that they do start off small but they quickly grow and let's see how that feels if it makes a difference so if you have your IPR on it just doesn't go very fast right but here we go so now we've got this growth happening at at a much faster rate um so that even though we're starting small and they're fading in it feels a lot more organic so let's just play through one time and see what we've got without any uh IPR getting in the way so this is coming out and over time the whole thing turns to to Green that's pretty cool so here is a preview of that I think I just want to lighten up the teal color at the end so it's a little brighter and I feel like it's not really producing enough um towards these outer edges so I think I'm just going to go ahead and increase the count and what I might do is increase the account over time and so we start off uh with an emission rate of let's say 4,000 at the beginning so so let's say 4,000 at the beginning but by the time we get to 200 I want it to be producing like 10,000 and I think that'll help us fill in some of those spots where it so it feels a little bit more solid as we go out yeah so that's feeling a lot better uh you you'll just have to you know I'm I'm actually going to double this so it's 20 yeah that's looking much nicer and the last thing I want to talk about is just how can you control the actual material right so that it's it's producing um the color as a material and so let's talk about that so I'm going to go ahead and create open up my materials and I'm going to create a new material and this is going to be a standard material this will be our mold and I'm going to open up the mold in red shift editor and I'm going to create a new um node and this node is going to be color user data we'll create that node and you'll notice um in the settings over here under attribute name it says presets and under presets there's particles and particle color or particle color with Alpha so if you have Alpha information included you can use that I'm just going to select particle color and I'm going to choose that and put that into my output color and it's going to look black right now it's not actually showing me the color and then I want to take this material and I'm going to apply it to the particle group right so I'll drag that on the particle group and if I just play this to show you that this is actually working a little bit uh and do my IPR you can see that it actually has some reflection now and some highlights happening so I went ahead and rendered this out and this is what we have for our final I added a few lights in the scen so we see this beautiful mold mold growth over time beautiful to me you may not think so uh on this onion model so I hope you've enjoyed this quick introduction to some of the tools in the new particle system in cinema 422 24.4 uh be on the lookout for more videos coming up if you've enjoyed this video you've learned something from it please like And subscribe to my channel and I'll see you in another video

Channel: Travis Vermilye

Views: 11,893

Keywords: particle system, c4d, mold, molde growth, sciart, art+science, particle simulation, unified simulation, moldy onion, tutorial, demonstration, software demo, software tutorial, 3d animation, 3d render, realistic artwork, 3d art

Id: unmrQFZp6sM

Length: 34min 34sec (2074 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2024