Bringing Visual Effects to Motion Graphics - VERTEX 2020 Presentation

I'm gonna do this morning over the next hour is show you a really nice scene that has been created by our art department which really demonstrates the power of X particle simulations and the beauty of the renders that you get with cycles 4d and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to break down some of these techniques for your live so you can see how relatively simple it is to get some motion graphics and visual effects work that looks absolutely stunning that looks like a whole team of artists have probably worked on it but actually you're able to do it even as just an independent freelancer on your own so here is a short animation of stunning animation with this neon city look so I'll play this one first before we go into the into the depth [Music] [Applause] [Music] so there's quite a lot going on in this animation is very short - about this striking Leone city look and there's loads of complex visual effects concepts going on in what is much kind of a motion graphic scene so first of all we've got this really nice fluid splash but if you can see we've also got this kind of mogh Rafi cubed rippling floor which is dynamic so when the splash hits the floor we get this ripple effect and we've got these nice kind of shiny mograph style cubes rippling along we've got things like spline dynamics here we've got some explosions and particle advection and here we can see look the splines are being moved and advective with this and then we've got this procedural organic growth of the city lights spreading on as the as the explosion hits so there are awful lot of techniques in there and what this demonstrates is that with with X particles all of the tools that that we have they're all coherent they all work together so you don't do a fluid sim and an explosion sim separately and then Comp it all together in post everything can be done at the simulation time everything talks to each other so the animations are always really coherent because they're all from the same kind of ecosystem so the first thing we're going to break down it is we're going to I'm going to recreate this splash with a dynamic floor scene for you which will demonstrate the ease of which we can bring these quite complex visual effects techniques - - motion graphics scenes so here we are inside Maxson's cinema 4d and here we have just a cinema 4d plane object and this is going to be our floor and the way we get normal cinema 4d objects to interact with X particles is we've got a tag system so on this plane we want this plane to be our floor so we're going to go a tags X particles tags and I've got Collider just stick that on and now this plane will interact with particles they'll bounce off it so I'm going to bring in an ex-parte achill system so this system is like a organizational hierarchy here where we store all of our X particles objects physics solvers modifiers and it keeps them in a really organized fashion which is obviously really important if you're sharing scenes with other artists they have to be able to read your scenes so the system does that and what happens by default is we are brought in and X particles emitter and the default emitter is this square and it spits out green particles on the said axis okay so this is going to be the start of our splash instead of it being this square we're going to change it to being a spherical shape it's gonna make it a bit smaller and now you'll see that those particles let me just change the display of those so you can seem a bit better we'll change it to squares there you go so now we've got particles spitting off like this let's move that down and you'll see see them bouncing off the floor that's because we've got the collider tag on so now we can start bringing some real-world forces into this to make it feel more realistically the gravity so we'll go to our modifiers list and bring in a motion modifier and as loads we've got turbulence and vortex wind all kinds we've got gravity here bring it into the scene and now the particles are falling to the ground fantastic so now we want them to start behaving like fluids because we're making a splash of water so we need to tell these particles you need to interact with each other as if you have fluid particles so we do that with a dynamic object so if I go into my dynamics menu the shed loads of dynamics objects we've got explosions we've got constraint systems we've got force fields got all kinds but what we want is a fluid effects so I'm just gonna bring that in and now it just needs to live in the scene we don't need to connect it to anything it just needs to be in the system and now those particles are going to be behaving a little bit more like fluid it's not quite right yet but we're getting there so let's increase the friction on our floor so they don't spread out as much cool and now what we're going to do is we want this just to be one splat of particles we don't want this constant stream so we'll go to the emitter to the emission tab and instead of it being raked so it just spits out these particles continuously we are going to not miss all frames we're going to end the emission on frame one so it just spits them out and that looks pretty pathetic doesn't it so let's increase the amount by changing this emission mode and now we've got a few more now I won't go into the detail here but I've used an emission mode called hexagonal which has been designed to work brilliantly with fluids and what this mode does it gives you a perfectly stable starting point with your particles to then do a fluid simulation so let's have a look we want these particles to be spitting downwards at the moment they're going in the normals direction of that sphere so let's just say we want to go down on the minus y axis all right so it's still not looking very splash like is it but we're edging ever closer so now what we want to do is put a load of force a lot of energy into the scene so what I'm going to do is go to the emission tab of the emitter which is where you control how the particles behave and I'm going to put their initial speed way up from 150 way up to 2000 ah so now we're getting a little bit of an initial splash we're starting to get the shape that we want great what I'm going to do is go to my gravity modifier and I can just reduce the strength of that gravity so it's not pulling down quite as ferociously and now let's have a look now we're getting a bit of a splash it looks nothing like a fluid but we've got the shape so this is the really cool bit now we've got this quite low particle count splash but to get it to look like a proper fluid splash we need to fill in these gaps because we've just got sparse particles all over whereas if we were able to fill in the gap we would start getting sheets of water and tendrils splashing up so the way we do that is it's really simple we go to dynamics and there's another dynamic object called the XP sheeter let's bring that in and this is really clever what it does it analyzes two fluid particles and it analyzes how they're moving away from each other and if they're moving away from each other in a way that satisfies the various different settings the threshold settings you put in it spawns new particles in the gaps so if I just hit play on the default settings we might not get any new particles we might let's just have a look I think we've got a few more just here where my mouse cursor is but not many so let's create some more I'm going to increase the maximum fluid density it's searching for which will start sheeting more particles ah look look at this big tendril that's appeared here now and now we're starting to get a splash let's increase that a little bit more and there we go we're starting to get what looks like a splash so now we've got loads more particles I'm just going to turn the display of them back from squares to dots so we can just see a little bit more detail and there we go so there is our splash so we've gone from what looked like just a splat of individual particles to a cohesive splash like crown splash and if we look at it from above you can really see that it's got that splat effect now before the things like fluid effects an XP sheeter existed it was really difficult to get that type of splash effect it would take you know a week of simulating a very powerful machine but now we're able to do it in minutes which is great so to take this from just being particles to actually something that we can render we need to change those particles into a into a mesh into a polygon object and that again is really simple we just go to generators because we want to generate a mesh and in here we're going to pick our X P open V DB masher and this is brilliant because you can mesh almost anything with this you can mesh trails you can mesh any cinema4d objects you can mesh clones you can mesh particles you can even mesh smoke and fire simulations and turn them into a polygon object so what we need to do what it asks for the measure asks for a source object what do you want to mesh we want to mesh our fluid particles so what we do is just drag in the emitter let's drag that in and look if I just get rid of those lines we have a very blobby looking mesh so it's obviously not right yet but you can see how it works it's creating a mesh around every particle and where those where those particles join it kind of creates this contiguous mesh and this updates frame by frame so it's really smart so what we need to do to make this look a bit more realistic and detailed and less blobby is in our opening VDB measure settings there's only two settings we need to concentrate on when doing particles the point radius to bring this point radius down you'll see that the blob enos reduces you see it coming in on itself so now it's getting a bit more detailed so the point radius dictates how that the radius around each particle and then we've got this Fox or size and that the voxel size dictates the size of these polygons so the lower the voxel size the more detailed the the mesh the more polygons that you have obviously it takes longer to simulate when you start putting in lots more polygons but what you end up doing is pushing and pulling on these two parameters until you're getting a look that you like so once you've got kind of the look we then want to start filtering this to make it look a little bit more so we do this we've got a filters tab and if I just activate filters did you see it's smooth and out a little bit because we've got our default median filter here and the default median filter is a really good one for fluids because it smooths out the majority of the mesh but it keeps a little bit of the blob eNOS and that blob eNOS is quite important when we put a highly a transparent reflective and refractive material on here you need a little bit of blob eNOS in there to get the detail of that fluid surface out otherwise it just it just doesn't look realistic so that's great and then if you want to once we've got the thinning I mean look if I just get rid of that median and bring in the Gaussian which is the smoothest filter it'll go really smooth so that's much more aggressive but I prefer the median and then once you've got the look that you like we can use what's called an offset filter which kind of brings the mesh in on itself you see it's like thinning it down but retaining the detail and now we're starting to get a really fine looking and fluid mesh so that's very cool so very quickly what in 15 minutes we've made quite a detailed fluid splash we've meshed it this is ready for render time which I'll show you how to do that in a little bit let's just have a quick look back at this render so we've done our splash and if you notice I mentioned at the beginning when this water hits the ground we've got this shock wave kind of rippling of the floor and it parts so we're going to get that set up now we're going to make this dynamic so what we want to do is make this plane a dynamic object so when the fluid particles hit it it starts to ripple and Bend so the way in which we're going to do that is this we need to take our plane and we can apply an X particles dynamic system to it but we also need it to be a Collider because we want the fluid particles to bounce off it we can't do both but here's the trick what we do is we get the cinema 4d connect object which connects objects cleverly and we're going to put the plane inside there and this is the clever bit we're going to put the collider tag on the connect object that's going to handle the fluid splash bouncing off the floor and on the plane we're going to make the plane dynamic and we do that by going to tax X particles tags dynamics click that on I'm going to go forward one frame now can you see that it has spawned a new particle if I reveal the lines on every vertex point of our plane you see there's a particle there so what's going to happen with these particles is they're going to be affected by anything that we put in the scene gravity turbulence and they'll move around and then they will make the plane deform with the shape of those particles because they're locked to the vertices so that's that's the principle but there's a couple of things that we need to do before we can get this wavy floor to work because we don't want these new dynamic particles to be affected by the gravity because otherwise the planes just going to fall away forever and it's not going to be there to bounce off our splash so we need to exclude them from the gravity we also need to exclude them from the sheeter this object that's making new particles otherwise we might spawn a load of new dynamic particles that we don't need so what we can do by default it just spawns these particles on its own and you don't have to do anything but what you can do for more control and in the dynamics tag is add an emitter and if we add an emitter it makes a new emitter in your scene let's just rename it emitter dynamics and now we've got full control over those dynamic particles with all of the emitter settings so what we can do we want to exclude the gravity in the sheeter so in the new emitter dynamics we'll just go to modifiers and look we've got an exclude box so I'm just going to drag in the sheeter and I'm gonna drag in the gravity now they've been excluded we also don't want the dynamic particles to interact with our collider tag on the floor because they're part of the same floor is that's not going to work so in our collide attack we've got an exclusions tab and we can drag in our dynamic particles so that's all set up we're just about ready to go so now we can adjust the dynamic settings to get our nice wobbly rippling floor so we're going to make the radius of those particles the same as our fluid ones so if I hit play now let's just deactivate the measure so it runs a bit more quickly if I hit play there goes the splash now those splash particles should be interacting with that floor and there's I don't know if you can see it on the screen there is a tiny bit of rippling can you see how those Poly's have been distorted so it is working but admittedly it's a little underwhelming and that's because it's just too rigid we need to loosen up that floor and make it a really wobbly floor so when the particles hit it it has this kind of shock wave effect so what we need to do look is reduce the rigidity way down so it's not rigid floor so this is going to help somewhat but now we've made it so wobbly that you can see look they've all kind of distorted over the top of each other and it's lost its form so it's kind of hard we want a middle ground we want it really wobbly but we want it to hold its floor shape and we do that really easily with constraints and these are just spring like imagine a spring between these dynamic particle and it can move and wobble but it holds its shape so I'm just gonna click on constraints press play and there we go if we come out we're starting to get a dynamic ripple and this isn't just happening on its own if I make our splash particles visible again only where the splash particles are hitting the dynamic particles it is rippling and creating this dynamic floor which means that the scene is perfectly coherent which is awesome and that's it so obviously this isn't good enough detail to render this is a very low poly floor and we're not actually going to be rendering this floor itself but if you wanted to you could all you need to do is bring in a subdivision surface put the Kinect inside that and look it's smoothed it out if I hide the lines now we've got a really nice smooth wrinkled floor which is interacting with those particles so that is easy done if you want to excellent so we've got the base simulation now okay let's just have a look at the video again so what we need to do now we need to turn this into this kind of mograph scene we need to somehow spawn these cubes on to this dynamic floor so to do that what I'm going to do is open a different scene so it's pretty much exactly the same but I've just cached baked down that animation that we've just seen so this is now in memory it's actually it's saved to save to disk and if I go into my X particle system can you see these red tags so these red tags say that this has been cached that information has now been baked it had isn't having to work it out every time you scrub the playhead which means that I can scrub backwards and forwards and we can see this seam and we can see our rippling floor but it's exactly the same as what we just had great so I'm just gonna make the mesh invisible because we'll get faster playback so this is the really powerful thing with X particles everything we've done so far has been done just with X particles but it integrates perfectly with all of the cinema 4d tools as well so we have a baked X particle system and we are going to mix it with a live cinema 4d mograph system which will be procedural and we can do both which is really neat so what we're going to do is we're going to bring a mole graph matrix object in so what this is it's just like a cloner but instead of it cloning geometry it just creates these kind of cubed reference points such as points in 3d space they don't render they don't do anything they're just a point in space and what we're going to do instead of spawning them in this grid we're going to spawn them onto our floor so let's go in we'll change the mode from grid to object I'm going to drag in my Kinect which is our floor objects I'll switch off that subdivision surface okay and if you can see that but now they've been spawned you see them they've been spawned randomly over the surface of our floor so instead of that we can change the distribution from surface to vertex and now we have got one cube per vertex of our cached dynamic floor so if I just make the emitter invisible if I'm to switch that off you can see that our matrix points are animating with our floor which is really cool and if I make the floor invisible now we've just got these are just our matrix points with our ripple but these are still editable with all of the effectors so look this is again it's a cash thing but if I go to mograph effectors and use one of the old effectors here we can manipulate these matrix points even though they're being driven by the X particles so if I just bring in say a formula effector this formula effective is going to be using this sine wave to change the position in the scale so watch so we're able to change the position of those matrix points parametrically procedurally even though that being the ripple is being driven by an X particles cached simulation which is really really cool and of course you can use all of the cinema 4d tools here so look we could use a fall-off so if I just bring in a spherical field let's just make that a bit wider and let's invert that so now the effector is only happening outside the bounds of that field and we're getting the initial ripple unaffected so obviously we don't want to use it in this instance but it's a good way of demonstrating that we can keep what feels like a live procedural animation even though we've got this cached X particles a base simulation let's get rid of that formula effector right cool so we've got our scene now we've got our mesh and we've got our dynamic floor so let's have a look at rendering so everything's been xed particles but we also make cycles 4d which is a CPU and GPU path tracing render engine and what are the really I'm just changing my layout to a cyclist 4d layout so this is exactly the same scene but we've just got some new windows this is the real-time preview where you're going to see a preview of the render this is the node editor where you adjust your materials and this is our viewport and we still got our object manager so it's exactly the same scene so what we're going to do is look let's make our mesh visible again okay and we'll bring in a cycles 4d environment which means we're going to be able to light this with an HDRI image ah so there we go we've got something so what we've got if I just dolly in there is our splash mesh which is being lit by this rather uninspiring HDR of a dilapidated what is it air hockey room but there we can see real-time rendering being lit by this by this HT RI so let's put a material on we want our splash to look like water so I'm going to go to cycles 4d this is the material manager here where you make all your materials I'm gonna bring in a surface I'm got all these presets and there's a glass material so I'm just going to click on that and drag that glass material onto the masher and instantly we got splash that looks pretty decent and it's just one note this glass material it's got index of refraction let's change that to what water would be 1.33 it's got a roughness slider a color and then a reflections model and that's it and just with the preset we've got a good look and what cycles is fantastic for is is two things you can just use the basic preset shaders and materials and you get really good results straight away with one simple note for people that aren't comfortable with you know complex procedural material building but then if you want to you can dive in really deep and have hugely complex no trees at 200 nodes making amazing procedural material so you can do both very easily cool so let's change this now now we want to well we want to render those matrix points and we can do that directly all we need to do is put a material on so that recycles 4d surface glossy it's a glossy just like a reflective material and I'm going to drag that onto my matrix object and look can you see what's happened just by default cycles has spawned has instance a sphere a glossy sphere on every matrix point but we want to be able to spawn a different object on there we want cubes and you can do this you can even spawn whatever object you want all you have to do as we go to the matrix object which we're rendering and we'll go tags cycles 4d tags and we've got an instance tag which allows us to instance any object in that position so by default it's fears but look I'm gonna get it's a Nevada cube let's just make it quite small turn by turn by 10 okay so in that instance tag I'm gonna drag in the cube to the objects and now we're instancing cubes I'm just going to put my material on the cube so now we've got these shiny cubes at this let's change this HDRI because this image is awful we'll go to the environment this is another cool thing in the environment object we've got an HDR tab and built in is an HDR browser so if I click on there it automatically opens up all of your HDR I libraries that are saved on your computer and then you can search through and try different looks so I've got this Manhattanites one with some nice HDR eyes and the one we're going to choose is this broad way I think it's pronounced Lafayette station so click on that and now this is what is lighting our seeing and we can see this reflective cubed floor now much more easily so let's make that glossy [Music] reflect and I'll good what I'm going to do with this environment actually gonna rotate it a bit let's rotate it by 90 degrees I'm just gonna give us a bit more of an interesting look so something L up now we can offer a little bit of contrast that's looking nice alright so just want to make these cubes a bit bigger so the gaps between them aren't quite as big so let's just go we can do this just in the instance tab we can make the size multiplier bigger let's maybe say 110 or 120 because we don't really want any gaps until they start moving away from each other so the final step is the problem is our eye is directed towards the HDRI cuz that's the bright point and we want our eye to be directed towards the splash so what we're going to do is illuminate from underneath the floor so with the light creeps up from between those cue points so the way we do that is we need to put a material on our floor connect I'm just going to take that out of the subdivision surface because we don't need that ok so let's put any object can become a light in cycles 4d all you have to do is put an emission material a material that gives off light so I'll go cycles surface emission put this emission material on the and that would look we can see the light popping through so let's change the color to like that nice electric blue that's shining through now and we can increase the strength so now we only really want the light to pop through where these cubes have been deformed by the wobbly floor so we need to increase the size still of this size multiplier let's bring it up that's getting better maybe 140 all right there we go so now it's only letting light in where where they have opened up this dynamic floor so just finally let's do this comes to life when we do a bit of depth of field so I'm going to bring in a cycles 4d camera so before these types of GPU path tracing render engines getting depth of field was a nightmare because it would but it would turn a 30 second per frame render into a 5 minute per frame render but now all we need to do is set this up really quickly in cycle so going to go to the camera and just pick an area of focus of the splash go to the cycles tag and we're just in the depth of field bit just bring up the size of this radius and straight away we've blurred it out and I'll add a few more blades to the aperture so we get some Bakke and then we'll just leave that to clean up a little bit so pretty quickly in what 20 minutes we've done a complex fluid splash we've measured it with create a dynamic floor which moves as it interacts with that splash and then we've integrated cinema 4d z-- mograph tools to be able to clone these and these instances at render time and very quickly we've visualized a really really nice looking render all done on a laptop fantastic right so that's that scene what I'd like to do is just move on now and show you this one so this is a simplified version of what you saw in the in the final render so what we have here is this really nice advection of colored particles which then interact with this city geometry and then we get this nice organic growth of the lights as they spread across our buildings and again what what's nice about this scene is that it's not faked it's not that the explosion isn't done and then the building done and then cobbled together in post this is all feeding off each other this simulation it's kind of a living and breathing sin so let's get rid of that I'll go back to my startup layout I'm just gonna open a new scene okay so what I've got here is just a very simple scene of some city geometry and it's just some three separate city objects in the connect object so what we're going to do first is spawn our light particles onto this building so we go to X particles that's bring in a system again just to keep organized and our default emitter again is just this square that spits out green particles on the z-axis but we want to spawn them onto the buildings so we go to the emitter to the object tab which controls its shape and then in the emitter shape let's change it to object then it asks what object do you want to use well we're going to use our building geometry I'm going to omit from the edges of that geometry and I can stick the particles to the source so they don't move off that source object and then in the emission tab I'm just going to put it to shot which means it's it shoots out a certain number on the first frame and that's it and let's put loads let's put like fifty thousand particles okay and if I call forward a frame now we're not going to see them that well because they're stuck onto this building but if I make the building invisible there we go so there are our particles for our building and what we want is for these to be black because the likes are switched off and we want them to grow on into the color of that whatever lights that we want so in the emitter instead of birthing them the default green color what we can do is change the particle color from green to let's just take all that color value out and now we can't see them they're there if I just switch off the sky we've got black particles but obviously we can't see them because the lights are off so now what we want to do is we want to grow these on and change their color from black to our lights color so how do we do that well we use a modifier called infection and what this does it's really cool it takes an infected particle and it spreads that infection and that's all it does so the way we do it is it's in a modifier and it's a control modifier called infects you so what we need to do is we need to make some particles infected none of these particles are infected at the moment so if I make that building visible and hit play nothing happens because there aren't any infected particles just there's no infection to spread so we need to infect the particles first and the way we're going to do that is with we can do it with our first going to show you how to do this with a seed object so if I bring in a seed object all it does is bring in this spherical volume see the yellow spherical volume and what it does is any particle that is inside that spherical volume will become infected so let's just bring it to the edge of our building okay I'll make the building invisible so I'll go forward one frame can you see that the particle is inside now it's hard to see on this screen isn't it let me just change that display mode to squares and then you guys there so all of the particles on the building inside of that have been turned red so they've become infected and now we've done that in fact you can just do its thing and if I come back and hit play now infection is spreading that infection across those black particles and turning them from blue to red and there's loads of settings in effect show which I've got won't go into now but if you want to you can make the the infection much quicker so it spreads up quickly or you can reduce it way down so the infection the rate of infection is much slower and there's an awful lot of control there which we don't go into need to go into now that's really simple but we want this to be our lights color so let's just change it from red to let's do that nice kind of electric blue color and I'll just change leave it that's fine okay so there we've got our affection and that's our lights coming on that's the basics but the magic happens a little bit later so what I'm going to do we're going to do an explosion now in a separate bit and then join it later so this system that we've just done I'm going to rename it system infects you all right and then we're going to do a new system for our explosion so I'm just going to switch that one off for now make it invisible and let's do a new X particle system and this one will call system explosion okay let's just switch off that sky for now right so we need to make our explosion so I'm going to bring in a plane as a floor object like that an explosion requires another dynamic solvent so we're going to go to our dynamics menu and this time we're not going to do fluid effects because it's not fluids we're going to use explosion effects which is for smoke and fire Sims so let's bring that in and what it does it brings in this domain this cuboid volume and the smoke and fire sim has to happen within this volume so we resize it to fit in our scene and you can see this grid on the back and what the grid suggests is that the quality level of that simulation the finer this grid which is the voxel size the more detailed and better your explosion is going to look but it's going to take a lot longer to compute because there's loads more calculations taking place the beauty with advection the moving of particles is that we don't need to render the smoke and fire we just need to use its shape to push particles around and as a result we can have a low-quality sim and the particles will bring out all of the detail so we can have a really high voxel size which means we get a nice quick moving simulation for particle advection so what we're going to do we're going to get our default emitter and this emitter we're actually going to keep it a rectangle this time and this is going to be what we're going this is going to be our fuel source to start our explosion so I'm going to go to the object we want it to go on the - said so it's it's firing particles towards our buildings this is going to be our fuel source so we need to do a couple of things to set this up we're gonna basically set these particles on fire so we're not going to meet all frames just going to emit for say 20 frames because just want to like a blast and we don't want full lifespan we'd probably want a lifespan of say 20 frames with a bit of variation and we could probably put the speed down a little bit so let's have a look now we have an emission something like that so we've just got a little spurt of particles so now we need to give them some fuel to blow up so we're going to go to extended data physical data and look there's a fuel value it's given one fuel and the final thing we need to do is we need to give them a tag so this emitter can speak to explosion FEX so it recognizes that they've got fuel so we go tags X particles tags exposure effects source there we go and now there we've got a low-resolution smoke splurt not quite what we want we want it to keep going towards the buildings so let's just I'll just move my little bit closer so what we can do is in the tag we can multiply the velocity from those particles into the fluid so it's going to kind of keep the momentum but now the buoyancy is letting us down it's floating up because of the gravitational forces on the various different elements so look I'm not going to go through obviously go through all the explosion effect settings because there are a lot it's highly complex but in the simulation if I just take the gravity out it's going to remove any of that buoyancy and it's just going to respect that's velocity information look it's just it's and it's moving through our buildings that's perfect just what we want okay great I'm just going to make that invisible because we would not remember we're not rendering this we're just using that movement to push new particles around so let's make a new emitter and just copy this one I'm gonna take the tag off because this new one is the one that we're going to see this is going to be the advective particles and this new emitter go to the emission tab and let's just increase the life of those to about 80 and the birth rate let's put loads in let's put like 50,000 and take the speed off so now what we've got is a load of particles but that just remains static in the emitter because they've got no speed so we need to tell those particles be pushed around by that explosion FEX simulation okay and that's called particle advection and the way we do that is really simple we go to the explosion effects object and it's got an advection tab which is switched off by default we just switch it on and all it's saying is all of these different bits of data that explosion effects generates in it in its simulations smoke burn temperature velocity color all of that can be passed into any particles it touches we don't need to pass in any data apart from the velocity the movement so we take off the smoke the burn the temperature the color and the UV we just want to pass in the velocity hit play ah now it's kind of working but it's kind of blogged down what's happened with it looks like we've broken it and this is a bit of a gotcha because what has happened is this the emitter that we're using to create the fire in the first place it's got the fuel it's creating the explosion but then those particles are being advective by the explosion that they've just made and it's got trapped so we need to say don't add vex the fuel particles just add vex the particles that we want to move so all we need to do is go to the emitter in question to the modifiers and remember we can exclude stuff we just exclude the explosion effects advection and now we will have our proper sim back and there we go and you can see even with a really low resolution smoke sim once we start infecting particles it brings out this really nice wispy detail and especially when you start rendering that with like additive materials it glows and the bits that have more particle density it starts to look really really detailed from what is a really cheap sim so finally what we're gonna do is gonna link these two systems now we want these the explosion to start the infection of our window lights we don't want to use that seed object so what we're going to do is this let's reactivate our system with our lights make the buildings invisible and what I'm going to do is get rid of that seed object remember this the seed was the roughest the spherical volume which initially infected our particles because what we're going to say is this this is super cool so remember we meshed the fluid in the previous scene with our particles and mesh them we could mesh explosions which is such an amazing thing to be able to do so what I'm gonna do he's got generators open VDB masher and I'm gonna just directly drag in the explosion effects solver into the source and all you have to do is match the voxel size in the measure with what your voxel size is in explosion so it was eight and now look we've got a live mesh of that explosion now if we wanted to render that mesh there are ways of making it much higher detail but we don't what we're gonna do is this we're gonna use a system called questions and actions in X particles and what it's going to do is it's going to ask a question every frame and the black particles are gonna say am i in the volume of that measure yes or no if the answer is no nothing happens if the answer is yes we're going to make them infect it okay which it sounds more complex than it is questions and actions are hugely useful and powerful and once you get your head around it very simple so what we're going to do is this let's go to our infects yo system to the emitter these are the black particles and look I've got a questions tab let's bring that up so I'm gonna add a question and there's loads of preset questions so got question types there's loads of particle data questions particle in particle data you can ask a question about the age of a particle the color the radius scale but we're gonna use a particle position question and the particle position question there's loads that we can ask but we're going to ask this inside volume question okay and it's saying what object do you want me to ask if I'm inside of it or not so what we need to do is drag in our measure excellent so the question is now being asked am i inside this volume yes or no and now what we need to do is say what do you want me to do if I am inside the volume so we add that's called an action so we add an action and look we can actually the action can just be to change what the particles look like to test whether this questions working or not so if this is working I'm going to change it to white squares so if this question is working when the particles get inside that volume they should turn white let's have a look so it's asking the question and there it's working as soon as they get inside the volume they're turning white brilliant so that editor display action is a really good way of testing whether your questions working or not so let's switch that off because we don't want that because we want to make them infected and that infection will take over and spread it across the building so we're going to go to a direct action because we just want them to be infected and we've got all these preset direct actions that we can change the life we can kill particles we can change their color we can change their size we can get into fries we can get there's all sorts but look we can change infección and the direct change is they will become infected so if this is working now we should have our advection and where it hits it should infect them and then effect show takes over and spreads that Lite infection all over our geometry and that's it working coherently and so with a bit of nice rendering lighting and a bit of depth of field we get this fantastic kind of organic growth of lights which when it's done to the enth degree you bring it back to this entire cityscape so you see some more advection here exactly the same technique and then here we have it moving on the city and growing across so that is just kind of scratching the surface of what some of the like really cool visual effects techniques are available within X particles and how they kind of into interact with with cinema 4d scenes and how relatively simple once you get your head around the ecosystem how relatively simple it is to get this happening there is absolutely loads more that we can show you but obviously there's just not time to fit it into 50 minutes so we've got our own in Cydia mousse in the main hall and we're gonna be there all day and X particles master John Bosley is with me as well to answer all the questions that I can't and would be more than happy to show you loads more stuff it's rather day

Channel: INSYDIUM LTD

Views: 24,829

Keywords: X-Particles, INSYDIUM, C4D, Cinema4D, Cinema 4D, MAXON, VFX, MotionGraphics, Update, Sneak Peek, Cinema, 4D, xparticles, particles, simulation, cgi, vfx, mograph, motion graphics, 3d, 4d, effex, visual fx, software, tutorials, tutorial, tip, hint, help, quicktip, trick, hints

Id: QrtjqCTVh7E

Length: 50min 12sec (3012 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020