How to Animate Particles Along a Curve in Blender (Without Curve Guide) - Bonus Tutorial

[Music] there are a lot of cases in motion graphics where you might want particles to follow a particular path the normal way of accomplishing this in blender is to use a curved guide force field which works great in some situations but this approach does have some serious limitations in other cases so to use a curved guide you just select a curve that's near where your particles are being emitted from go to the physics tab enable of force field and switch the type from force to curved guide then as long as your particles are within the minimum distance of the end point then it'll start to follow along that path now the speed at which the particles go are determined by their lifetime value so this is one limitation because you don't really have much freedom in how fast they move or how long they last of course the motion does look a little bit slow and boring though you can give a little bit of a kink like braid if you change the frequency amplitude to make things a bit more interesting but another limitation of curve guides is that other forces like gravity or extra force fields won't affect these particles whatsoever so it's an all-or-nothing thing unfortunately if I wanted to have a little bit of random motion inside of here because it all looks still a little bit too uniform that's just not possible now the alternative to using a curve guide is to just use a regular curve here I have the exact same scene with a turbulence force field and with gravity turned off and I want the particles to be affected by the turbulence as they move along the curve so instead of a curved guide I'm going to enable force field physics for this but instead of switching it I'll just leave that force and gives a strength of negative five now when we play this back the particles if I update the cache it looks like there we go these particles are going to be attracted to this curve but at the moment they're just attracted to the origin point so we just need to switch the shape from the points to curve and now it's going to be attracted to the points along the curve so I can see it's being affected by the turbulence force field and it's following along now it's following along very loosely and you can adjust how tightly it follows the curve by adjusting the flow settings the higher the flow the more it's going to stick to the curve the speed is going to be determined by the strength so if you have a really high negative speed the particles have been moving very fast and if you have a very low speed they'll be moving very slowly so that's just a particle tip that I hope you find useful I've definitely used it in some situations recently if you're brand-new to physics and particles and all of that stuff inside of blender head over to CG cookie using the link below and you can see the entire intro to dynamics course which covers all nine types of physics to get you up to speed so thanks for watching and see you next time [Music]

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 222,624

Keywords: blender, blender3d, particles, 3d, 3d modeling, render, animation, vfx, visual effects, animating, 3dblender, tutorial, beginner, learn, how to

Id: PYHOV3bVIG0

Length: 3min 12sec (192 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2017