EmberGen Tutorial #0001: Getting Started With The UI

hey guys this is Nixie the founder of Jing effects I'm gonna be showing you the UI of our beta for ember gen the first thing which i think is the most important thing is opening a project or a preset and letting you guys know that we have a bunch of presets that you can test I have a couple built already and so I'm gonna open up this magic fire here and you can see now that we have an opened project that was previously made it's already got nodes in it and if you go to file new project or a new preset it'll restart your simulation from scratch and so we'll go back and open up our magic fire again so that's how you open up our project the next thing I want to go over is each panel so we have our node graph our node info window we've got our our timeline viewer tree over here and then we've got our key view and then right here we've got our viewport that has different things like our export and our previews and things like that we're going to go through this now so for our node graph the first thing you need to know is how do you spawn a node so for instance if you wanted to spawn another emitter you can right click go to emitter and then primitive and then there you go that's how you spawn a node of course you drag from a pin and connect into another so you can have multiple emitters you want to add a shape to this you add it like that and you can see now that we've got shapes that we can drag around in the viewport and so from there you can also drag off directly so instead of having to right-click and go through a menu if you see any pin you can drag off directly and find the node that would work with that specific pin so for instance you know fire color we see you've got color values and color gradients you know if we want to do a volume we see that you can do a scene node you know we've got a catch node all that stuff so from there that is the basics of spawning nodes and then we also went through connecting nodes if you want to delete connections you can alt left click and that will delete a connection you can also just right-click a label here and click disconnect link needs to be connected then we cannot respawn that and I'll go ahead and delete node so you can just click click a node press delete and it will delete the node the other thing is as you can box select so our box isn't very visible yet but you can box select multiple nodes you can move them around or you could say you know select these two ctrl-c and ctrl-v and copy and paste those nodes if you want to and we do have a simple undo redo system to some degree it may not work for everything yet like copying and pasting notes but if you press ctrl-z it should be able to undo in the future and that's about it for the for the node graph it's very simple if you select a node that particular nodes information will pop up in the window below it called node info and within this this node info window we have the ability to animate parameters and and and all that stuff so for instance if we wanted to click this shape preset and we change like the radius of our sphere or whatever you can see that the fire over here is updating and I am hitting the bounds and that's because I have some really small bounds for this particular fire since it was supposed to be for a torch but yeah and then if you wanted to change the balance you can change it right here so we could you know add more space to Z and things like that and then you can click this show/hide lightness to show your your balance and whatnot but from there also within our node info window if you wanted to add variables to your timeline we have the these little circles with three lines and what that means is is that it's currently reading the values from these little widgets right here and so for instance we've got like our position variable you can see it's moving our little emitter here and if you wanted to preview your emitter you can show it it's that's what we'll do here you can check this little box so you can check boxes that kind of thing and then what you can do is you say ok well I want to animate this and this is going to take us over onto the timeline so you click this once and a little stopwatch will show up showing you that it's now down here on the timeline so if you've got a little viewer down here to show us like a tree of different variables and stuff so you can see that we could add multiple things and if we you know do a position for this too you can see that it categorizes it based on the node and then you have your different channels that you can animate here so I'm going to remove this one from the tie line and one thing I will also mention is that you'll see that there's like this connection thing if you click it after the stopwatch and what this is supposed to do is it will expose a variable to the node graph what the only example I can show you right this second of that is if we look for smoke color and we do that and we can see that it pops up on the node graph eventually all variables will pop up on the node graph one of you expose it right the second we only have fire color and smoke color available so that you can use color gradients so from there back to our position if you want to add a key to the time line you right click wherever you want to key and then if you want to edit that key for instance like we can we can go right here and what if you right-click the key out like a box pops up and you can edit that and so we can see here that the x-axis is being animated for this little sphere and we can also say okay you know let's go over here a little bit more and then we also want to you know maybe edit our our y-axis and so then you have things that are are going that way which is pretty cool and so then from there if you wanted to expand on this and edit your actual curves for this instead of just seeing this this linear view the key view of what your keys you open your curve editor here and if we scroll out a little bit and select X we can see our particular curve setup for X and so if you zoom in and out what that does is it just zooms out on both the the timeline key curve which we need to make sure that this right here locks to zero and so then if you hold shift and middle mouse button you can go up and down if you hold shift and zoom in and out what that does is it changes the scale of the view over here and then if you hold ctrl and zoom in and out it'll change the scale of the timeline up here and then if you middle click and just hold middle click what it does is it allows you to pan up and down you can also pan left to right by holding middle click so unfortunately while showing the curve graph I just crashed by panning this back and forth but we'll deal with it for now so that was basically it for the the curve view and from here the last thing I want to show is if we were animating a positioning we had a key you can select a key by left clicking and you can press delete you can also press this X down here that will also delete the key the next view is the viewport so this is this is the most important view in the software of course because that's where you can actually see your entire scene and so the gist behind the node graph is everything that you're doing eventually ends up in this scene node and then your capture node allows you to export that particular data will help a tutorial on exporting soon so from here first thing I want to show is how you can switch cameras so you can see here in the node graph we have a camera node I and what this is doing is its gonna allow you to capture from a specific camera when this specific camera you can like lock your position your orientation you can lock both that way you don't accidentally move your camera if you're messing around with it so then up here we have this default camera which is just our our standalone you know typical viewport camera and then we have an actual camera object which we can select too you can have multiple cameras if we drag off what you didn't connect doesn't like you can have multiple cameras in this particular build but you should be able to in the future so from there what we have is we've got our default we got our camera and we'll just select here so with your default weight let's say that you you have like the perfect view and it's exactly what you want for an hour you're exporting flipbooks or whatever what you can do is you can go into your camera node and click copy from current camera you can see it'll change all your current values so then you can switch to your camera and it has the exact same position data for it and so then from there our camera controls so if you left-click and what we can do is we can go into our scene real quick and we can add in a checkerboard ground so that we can see a little bit better in 3d space so if you left click it will pivot around the fire based on the pivot point of the current camera middle mouse button will pan up and down side to side if you scroll in and out it will zoom for you and we're gonna add in Alt + right mouse button to dolly in and out so that you don't need to use the scroll wheel and then if you hold right mouse button and then press WASD you can fly around the scene and it sure your typical free cam type view and if you press C it will reset the camera so then the next thing we have is if you wanted to restart your simulation you can press R that's that restart to the sim if you want to pause it you can press space you can also do that by clicking the pause and unpause button up here we also have one down here on the left and then once it's paused we have this little step button so if you wanted to step one frame at a time you can click this double arrow right here and it will do that and then these next buttons buttons what they do is they allow you to switch between rotate mode and transform mode and then what this does is it resets the sim as well so instead of pressing R you can also press this little cycle button and that will reset the same as well so the next thing is our raytracer view so right now this is our raytracer view and it is essentially the final render of your simulation and so typically whenever you're doing a final render if you aren't using the Star Trek recording button which you can only have that if you have a license or you're using your free trial start recording will record the entire viewport so all the objects in it but then the ray tracer view in general will only show you or sorry the export of the Ray tracer view will just have the fire in it so then the next thing to show is our preview window and so the preview window is really mainly just good for flipbooks and image sequences so if you're in games and you're making flipbooks this right here is your sprite size for each individual frame and it's gonna show you how your fire is lined up or your smoke or whatever it's lined up with that particular frame making sure it's not on the edges or anything like that and then if you wanted to change the preview size you can go over here and we can say you know 512 by 512 and that's kind of change the texture size you can see it's slowing down a little bit because it's increasing the amount of texture reads on the graphics card and so typically 256 by 256 is good it doesn't matter what what the size is because the space that it takes up is going to be the same no matter what the the preview size is and so then we also have different channels and so what I'll do is I'm going to open up a new preset here that can show us off show off all the channels and so this right here is a smoke preset that I have and within this we've got like our key light we've got a ambient render so that you can have ambient lighting we've got our emissive channel which there is no miss of in this particular fire we've also got scattering which is for fire we've got motion vectors temperatures smoke flames which are no flames in this case again albedo the emissive channel there is none and so I can go back to the fire and I can show you the rest we also have depth six point lighting so both channels and if we go back to this magic fire and then we click like our temperature we can see that we've got higher temperatures we do have our missive channel which is essentially your final fire and then you've got like render emissive which includes like your scattering and all that stuff as well if there were smoke so so that's the the gist of the preview it just allows you to preview different textures and if you were in the capture node and like let's say that you wanted to change your miss them for something like that we do have like MSF multipliers so you're able to once you're in your capture node and you're ready to export which this is more something for the export tutorial but once you've got that going you can change different values for the preview so that's about it for that then we have the the export tab which for this I would need to just do like a quick export like I said I'll go into more detail behind the exports but what we can do is I'll just hit a Q export here and press R to restart it and then if we go to the export time we can see the flipbook that it just created and so this is the texture that it made and then you could save this out as a flipbook or whatever in this case it's not a perfect flipbook it was just something that I quickly did just to generate a texture so that you can see what the export view does and if you had exported multiple textures which I can do right this second so we can add in a new thing and we'll do something like I don't know maybe our normal map or something and we'll add in another export image and then what we'll do is we will cue our export here to our export here press R and hopefully it should work here let's see Q export Q export there we go let's know it exported and I guess there is no normal map for for fire but then if you want to see what what export it actually did I you click each image and then you could rename this you know you know normals or whatever and so then you can rename your nodes and that kind of stops which I forgot to mention that earlier so then the other thing is is if we go back to the ray tracer whew and say things are going a little bit slow we have a settings which once this this is actually fixed we might have the settings cog over here in the viewport if you can't find it but just look for the settings cog icon and from here we can also change like the lighting quality and stuff so if you want the viewport quality to be really low so you get more performance out of it you can see that we're changing the quality of the simulation or nothing the simulation but the rendering and that makes it so that you can edit things faster so you can change that and then you can also customize things so say if you wanted the you know you wanted to change the Ray marching steps you know in particular or whatever you could do that if you wanted to and then we have our rendering quality export by default it's just maxed out that's what we would recommend is that you just leaved it completely maxed out and then we also have like different settings and then you know ways to view you know velocity channels and stuff like that so if you wanted to view your velocity Channel or say your temperature or whatever to debug your simulation kind of see what's going on you can you know change the resolution of those particular viewers you can change you know the reference velocity or the reference temperature that kind of stuff and then depending on how you're exporting things so for instance if you had exported a render combined you can choose in the settings panel whether or not you want it to be premultiplied alpha or just straight alpha and so that's mainly for flipbooks and image sequences and that's about it and so yeah I believe that's everything dealing with the viewport and how it works and this video is a little bit longer than I anticipated but that goes over pretty much every every setting that we have we also have a debug node right here which you can spawn a debug node and then it's mainly for for our developing purposes but you can go in and see you like you know how long the simulations taking our different channels that we have and then if you check these boxes you're able to see debug data inside the viewport so other than that that is everything dealing with the UI I have nothing else to show thank you support us and go to our website and buy images

Channel: JangaFX VFX Software & Tutorials

Views: 33,650

Rating: 4.9709091 out of 5

Keywords: EmberGen, JangaFX, Fluid Simulations, Real-time Smoke, Fire, CGI, VFX

Id: ZCi41UCau_8

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020