IBC 2018 Rewind: Bob Walmsley (Insydium) – X-Particles: Harnessing the Power of Real World Physics

hi everyone so X particles if you're not a next particle is user it is a plug-in that lives inside cinema4d and it helps artists create fantastic particle effects but also we have lots of other fluid and physics solvers which means this is great for motion graphics good for visual effects as well and it is now with our new updates fully working inside the fantastic cinema 4d r20 with all of the amazing new features that Maxon have brought in X particles is fully compatible with those so over the next 40 minutes or so I'm just gonna dive in and show you some of the new X particles features up and running working in Mac's ons r20 and demonstrating how this can be integrated into your motion graphics or even VFX workflow to help you make stuff look nice so let's crack on but it just play you this render now this was rendered by our fantastic artist Mario Tran who is incredibly talented guy and he literally finished this on Friday morning before I got on my plane to come to IBC so this is demonstrating this is going to be a kind of theme of what I'm talking about today it's mixing our physics solvers so we're not just going to be solving for fire and smoke we're going to be solving for fire and smoke and mixing it with water or with grains or with more constraints so here's the render so we've got this really nice fluid simulation which is the molten metal and what we're able to do with X particles is then emit fire from that fluid simulation which is giving us the the flames and the smoke and then we're using other physics within the system to get these really nice little spark elements which are jittering about and using our VDB meshing tool to get these fantastic kind of bits of metal that were once molten of solidified in the mold so that's one of our renders that will add rebuilt rebuild during this presentation and also let's have a look at this one so now we've rittenhauer fluid solver and it is three and a half times faster than the previous version of our fluid solver so it's much better to work with and it also has a fantastic grain system so we can do sand granular snow ice animations and again this is kind of a multi physics scene because we've got our fluid solver creating the sand but the movement is being created by particle advection an explosion which we can't see in the render is driving that movement forward so again we've got two physic solvers working together to get this this really nice movement all of these things are rendered in our plugin cycles 4d as well which is a bridge so cinema 4d users can use blender cycles render engine right inside cinema4d work it in hour 20 it's fantastic so we're gonna have a look at that and also I'm just going to show you before we dive into the software a couple of kind of hardware renders of the fluid solvers different looks that you're able to achieve so again on the theme of mixing physics this one so here what we have are two solvers being mixed we have got a fluid solve which is the waterfall coming down but then we have got this kind of slushy snow and what's going to happen is it's going to get engulfed by the water and start mixing into this same fluid simulation so as it comes down it grabs it it breaks up there's some clumps left remaining and it all becomes congealed as it makes its way down towards the bottom of the of the simulation so let's dive in so here we are inside cinema4d r20 and I've got a very simple scene setup so X particles is a plugin and once you install it you get all of these menu items and once you start using it you'll find that it feels very similar to using the the mograph tools inside cinema4d very intuitive so if you know mograph already and the user cloners and effectors you will pick up the X particles workflow of very quickly it's very similar so if I hit play on this scene it's got a look rubbish all I've got is one particle emitter emitting loads of blue particles and it doesn't really look like fluid at all and what's happening is if I just open up the X particle system we have an emitter and they are colliding with this plane that's got a client AK and they're sliding down so what we have to do to make this start behaving like water is switch on the physics for water the fluid solver and it's called a fluid FX so if I just switch that on I don't have to link it to anything I don't have to parent it or attach a node it just lives in the scene particles will start behaving in a fluid like way press play and straightaway the fluid solver is doing its magic and it's making all of those particles interact with each other in a physically accurate way to simulate water flowing down this surface now talked about how it's very similar to using mol graph X particles it actually works with mol graph very well as well so at the bottom of this scene this cube here is the geometry that the particles are sliding down that cube is just this cube and what I've done I've put it inside a connect object and the connect object has the collider tag to say collide with the particles so if I drop any object in that connect object now it'll be a Collider object with the fluid so if I just activate this cylinder there it is in the middle and it is under the connect object so now this will start interacting with the fluid and it should bounce off it that's working nicely and now if I put that inside a cloner ammo graph cloner because it's all under the connect object these are going to interact with that fluid solver as well and this is a simple random effector set to noise on the on the cloners so they're animating in real time this is all playing in pretty decent speed in the viewport and all the physics are working with each other so this is really useful this integration if you've got previous scenes that are built which might benefit from a bit of fluid solving or fire solving you can just throw them in and try it and everything should really work ok so I'm not going to go into massive detail about how to setup fluid souls because I'd need six hours and I would bore you to death that's something that you need to do in your own time and we're going to have loads of tutorials and training online to help you out with that but it's not good for live presentation trust me but what I will do is give you the basics and the basics of this in the fluid solver you'll see there are very few parameters that's it hardly anything and what the fluid solver does these settings dictates how accurate the solve is so if we've got it on accuracy fast this is a preset this means our going to get really fast visualization and you're gonna get nice speed in your viewport but the the simulation isn't that accurate and it means things like complex collisions might not work correctly because it's just not got enough sub steps and iterations to work with but it's really good for previz but then if you want to you can increase this to a higher number and this is going to automatically set more iterations of sub steps make it more accurate but it will run more slowly so if you've never used SPH fluid solvers before use these presets and if you want it to do quickly put it on fast and if it doesn't look right gradually put it on to their medium or high or even accurate until you get the accurate solve that you need and that's all you need to do if you've if you've used fluid solvers before you can go into custom and that opens up all of the settings where you can say how many iterations and sub steps are you and why you would use them and the thresholds and all sort but mercifully if you're lazy like me you can just use these presets and they work great alright so that's just the accuracy of the solve and that's all you do in that but where you can start changing that the lock and the flow of the liquid is actually in the emitter itself the thing that's spitting out the particles so if I go to my emitter go to the extended data tab I've got a fluid data and again there's not that many parameters here but what I'll show you is at the moment this we've got this set up just to be a nice liquid if I ramped up the viscosity it will start being a bit more gloopy and you'll see this especially when it interacts with with the Collider objects it's becoming a more gloopy glue like paint and then if I may increase the surface tension this is going to have a kind of it's almost going to double that impact sort what surface tension does it tells the fluid to try and come together into an object which has the the least surface area possible so you get much more blobby stuff so I'm just going to show you a scene which will actually demonstrate that a lot better because it's a really great cheap technique so in this scene what I've got is a square emitter a cube emitter emitting these particles so you see they start as a cube and then is that as it plays you see they get kind of blob into a sphere and that's the surface tension working to try and make it have as little surface area as possible in it and it makes a sphere so this is the cool thing for kind of you want to do like a like a microscopic render or or demonstrate liquid in a kind of a more wet a weightless environment what we can do in the fluid data is just stick that surface tension right up put a turbulence in there and what we're going to get the turbulence is trying to force the particles apart but the fluid solver and the surface tension is going to try to keep them together and create these spheres and then they'll break apart and we get this really nice kind of gluey ping and this is running in real time in the viewport so it's a very light sim and we get this really nice effect and the only other thing I've done to try and keep them from flying off is we can activate an attractor which is no modifier which is almost like pulls them in and you can see here that we've got this working with cinema 4d our twenties fields now so in the fall-off tab I've got a spherical field and an invert and all this is saying is inside this inner sphere if the particles are inside this inner sphere the attractor is having no impact on them at all and as the particles move into the fall-off they'll start getting attracted back into the center and you just get this nice language push and pull kind of organic blobby looking animation which I actually just built this to try and demonstrate what surface tension meant and I thought a happy accident it's quite a nice simple technique okay cool so what else we can do with fluids I mentioned with that really nice render that you saw of the sand we can do granular which we can get some stunning results now this this is a pre cached scene this is the only pre cached scene I'm gonna play you but here we have got three snowballs with different granular settings given different types of grains so obviously on the left hand spear it's much more like dry sand the middle sphere is the most clumpy and then the right-hand one is kind of like a mixture between the two and this is pre cached so there are 150,000 particles in this scene so 50,000 per snowball and it took nine minutes to cache the whole scene 150 frames which not the end of the world for production you'd want a higher particle count as always with this stuff but it's still it still works pretty well what a night what I like about these if you follow that if you follow the path of this one here we'll see that it breaks breaks into another bit smashes and then the following one then crumples it and obviously it's all interacting with each other and if you look at this one I really like if you keep your eye on follow the path of this as it disintegrates it leaves a trail behind it as it gradually gets smaller and smaller and these types of effects obviously can be done with the old fracturing techniques with valen a fracture then it may be emitting particles behind to fake that kind of dissipation and disintegration but what grains do is give you that that real world that real world solve which gives you a bit of added realism all right so while demonstrate now is again mixing solves so what I've got in this scene but it's switch off I've got three emitters one is going to produce some water which is going to slosh about in object and so what I've got I've got a wit a gravity modifier in the scene which is making the particles fall to the bottom of the cube as they would in the real world and then I've got a wind pushing them across this side and I can I've actually got the control just to tell the wind to push only the particles on the surface of the water cuz in the real world the whole volume of the ocean isn't being pushed by the wind it's just the water particles on the top and we have that control and X particles to be able to do it so that's that now I have got a snow emitter coming in now I've got this running at quite low resolution because I wanted to play in real time for you so this is set to water then I've got an emitter set to grains and it's being pushed around and floating on the top because it has different physical properties and if it was a higher particle count higher res it would look more clumpy and more realistic but we can see it floating on the surface and then what I've got is I've got a sand one and the sand is similar to the snow it's a granular solve but I've given it a massive density value so what should happen is - it should sink really quickly into the water because of that higher density causing a nice splash let's have a look so here comes this the sand so just that disperse is that water as it pushes its way through we've got a really nice splash and then it settles and sinks to the bottom of that of that water volume and then we can let's include the snow so what should happen now is the snow should land on the top kind of smash apart into slush and float and then be crushed by the sand with a high density value so all interacting in the same scene we've only got one fluid effect solver in there that's the physics and then we set all these different parameters getting different shapes with the particle values and the dam got a scene for it the dynasty tricks really good you can get you can get liquids with different densities interacting with each other so you can have oil floating being poured into water and it so it'll initially sink as it pours in and then float to the surface and it's a yeah there's loads of really cool mixtures of these these solves that we can do so instead of just showing your pre-made stuff let's let's I want to build some of a scene in front of you to show you how we can set these up relatively easily now one again I'm doing this a low-resolution at lower particle counts and that's why I can build it and so it'll run in real time for production you do higher particle counts and you won't get as obviously a speedy viewport performance so let's just look once more at well have a look at recreating this this is another one of Mario's scenes so this is a granular solve as we said and he set up the the sand and exactly the same way that I've demonstrated but it's been add vectors been moved by the velocity information created by a smoke and fire explosion so two different solvers working together and it's pretty easy to set up okay so in this scene here is my X particles logo which is just a piece of geometry and what I want to do is I want to fill that geometry volume with particles that are in a static State and that's going to be our granular our granular body so what we have to do is have an X particles emitter and instead of it being a box or a circle we can actually say emit from an object so in the emitter shape we select object and we drag in the X P logo object so now this is going to work as our particle emitter so now if I go to my emission this is really important I need to set the emission mode to hexagonal and that's important because what it will do let me just create the particles what hexagonal is done it's taken the volume of that geometry and it is used a hexagonal grid to perfectly berth particles so there is no gaps between them and no intersections and that's really important with fluid solves that you don't have intersecting particles because it'll mess around with the density and that explode and you'll lose the solve so this is a really efficient way of starting with a very good body of particles so that's that's how I start I've got it set to have no speed obviously because we just want the particles to be static and they're emitting on one frame so there we go that that's our particles so that bits pretty simple so we've got a fluid effects body in there and the fluid effects is going to be making them granular so the only thing we need to do is go to the emitter grains to the extended data tab and just say turn it to granular I want to have a hundred percent friction which is going to make them really kind of clump together and we'll leave it at the settings for now okay now I've turned on my fluid effect solver press play and nothing's happening there's no fluid like motion or no granular and that's because there are no forces affecting these particles yet nothing nothing is making the move so we can't see that their fluids or grains now normally in the granular sim you'd always use gravity because you want them to smash on the floor but we're going to do something different in this render we're going to use the force made by an explosion to push them around so let's make the explosion so the explosion we are going to use our fire solver which is called explosion effects and what that does if we bring that one of those into our scene it brings in this surrounding box which has a grid on the back and the fire has to take place within this grid so we have the grid and here's the object and I won't go through all of the settings because there are a lot but it gives you so much control over the shape of your fire explosion and but we won't go into that today is not the right time so how do we get fire we need to tell that domain that we want something to blow up so we're going to use particles to blow it up so I have got another emitter here and it's set to be this box and if I press play just switch off the grains so that's all we've got we've got a box emitter emitting these green particles and they're traveling up on the y-axis they've got varying speed so it looks a little bit random and what we need to do is tell explosion effects these particles have fuel on board and we want to ignite that fuel and make an explosion so the way we do that it's similar to giving a particle fewer fluid values we go to the particle extended data physical data and we want to give it some fuel so I'll give it to fuel and the last step so it can communicate with our explosion effects is to give it this emitter source tag just go tags X particles tags explosion effects source and that's it so now if I hit play those particles the fuel is being ignited and it's making a smoke and fire sim now I've got this display of the sim set a very low resolution so it plays well so it looks a bit blurry in a bit blobby but you can of course make that look better so if we go to the explosion effects go to the display various different ways of visualizing the simulation at the moment that displays set to the smoke and fire but I can set it to the temperature values of the sim we can increase the resolution of just the display by upping these values but that'll give you a poorer viewport performance we can look at all sorts and this is the the key channel that we're creating in this simulation is velocity and we'll look at that velocity velocity data and we're going to use that velocity data to push our sand around that's what we're going to harness so I'm just going to but actually we don't need to view this anymore we know it's happening it's in the scene that's working now what we need to do is tell it to move around these particles and we can see that it's pushing them up and they're moving along with that velocity information caused by the explosion and that's happening because in the explosion effects object we have got particle advection switched on and what we've got is velocity set to 100% so it's passing that velocity information into the particles making the move and crack apart so then all we have to do is put our fluid effects solver back on to make them behave like grains and they should start cracking in clumps and moving up and it's working pretty nicely so that's mixing the two different solvers together but we can also control that very easily in X particles so I just go back to the video if you notice the explosion obviously is coming from below and pushing them up but if you look at the animation the destruction is actually starting from the top and making its way down so that's happening counter to the way in which that explosions working and that's what I think makes it look such a kind of eye-catching scene so the way we're going to do that is using some of the control tools we've got in Ex particles and we're going to use something called groups so if we if you're an expert equals user and you haven't you don't use groups much I'd urge you to practice because they give you so much power and control of your animations so I'm going to go to my grains emitter groups and I'm going to create a group and this group I'm just going to give it another color so it'll be obvious so all it's going to happen is when I press play the partners are going to be put in the purple group and everything else is going to work exactly the same it's going to add vex and it's doing the same thing but this is the key I can tell explosion effects only to add vector calls in specific groups so let's it let's build on I make a new group and this one I'm gonna let's make it right I don't know orangey and now I'm gonna make circles so I'm gonna go to explosion effects into the advection and you see I've got a groups option here I'm just gonna put in particle group two let's just change that to a very different color so now explosion is only going to add vector calls in particle group two so if I hit play they're not advective anymore because they're in particle group one and we haven't put any particles in group two so they don't exist and there's no advection so now what we can do is use a tool to artistically transfer particles from Group one into group two and as they go into group two they'll then start to adverts and we can use the new are 20 fields to do this so what I'm going to do is go to my modifiers menu and are going to go to control modifiers and we've got a change group modifier bring it in and this two things we need to do we need to tell it which group to affect so we want to affect particle group one and we want to put them into new group particle group two and by default it'll just happen immediately so if I press play they're immediately getting putting in part legal group two and they're starting to advert but we want to transition them into particle group 2 and we want control over that and that's where we're going to use a field so we'll go to the fall-off tab and we all pick I'll just use a box field and let's move this up so what this is saying is if the particles are inside this inner square they will be put into particle group two and if they are outside of it they will remain in particle group one so I'm just going to change the fall off by remapping like that really intuitive these new remapping tools that excellent so we'll do that and that's what we need to do so now if I hit play there in particle Group one and if I animate this field it transfers them into particle group two and they start to add vets so all you need to do is keyframe this field on the wine so we'll start it there add a keyframe another keyframe ah what am I done what my tongue on let me let me just delete all that cuz I'm doing something wrong the keyframes from the brains not working anyway if we keyframed it we would get that and it would automatically come down like this start to add effect and that is exactly the technique that Mario used in that scene so the final the final render although it looks incredibly detailed and the movement all looks very complex actually the control of it is pretty simple and it's the magic of the physics solvers that is giving us that really nice kind of fluid motion pretty much for free I mean it feels like you're cheating sometimes playing around with this stuff okay so let's have a look so with mixed reviews explosion effects for the velocity we've mixed it with a grain solve let's do let's recreate another scene and this one is this really nice smoke and fire that played at the beginning so this is slightly different traditionally in cinema 4d it was quite tricky to have really close control over what you emit fire from and and growing it and there were certain ways of kind of masking fuel channels to get it to go in the way but it it was a bit hit and miss and it wasn't that art director ball but now we can ignite fluid and get fire from it which is really really easy and an incredibly useful so what I'm going to do is let's just do this one from scratch so what I'm going to do is is build a basic container with a with a mold in it so we'll start with a cube and we'll bring in a torus and scale that down and what we're going to do is use our open V DB measure to quickly make a mesh out of this well go two generators open V DB measure and I just need to drag my two objects in make the original objects invisible because we're going to mesh them so at the moment you can see that it's set to Union so it's just made a mesh out of both all I need to do is go to my torus and just set it to difference and it's a bit big so it looked at it'll update live so there's our Channel let's make this cube a bit fatter I think okay and it's a bit kind of oxidized here because our vauxhall the size is quite big so I'll just put that down to say two and then we want to smooth out these edges so we'll add let's add a Gaussian and I'll put the width down to make it sharper so there's my mesh and I'm the world's worst modeler and that if I was doing it without our measure or with the new volume builder in cinema that'll take me probably two days so let's just make that current state to object switch that off and that's going to be my mesh so this is going to be filled up with fluid that we're going to set on fire this this this channel here so what we need to do is make this mesh let's move it down we need to tell it to collide with particles otherwise the particles will just go through them so to do that we will go to tanks X particles tags and we'll stick a Collider tag on there let's take the elite I'll leave it as default for now so now I'm going to get in a meter this is going to emit particles and by default it will emit green particles in the Z direction and if I move it down it'll start bouncing off this because we've made it a collision object so that's where we're going to start our water from let's just add a few more frames to the scene so let's change the shape of this from a rectangle to a circle and I'm going to scale this circle size way down - something like that this is going to be our stream of fluid and let's put some gravity in so we'll go to X particles modifiers we want to change the motion of those particles so it'll be a gravity motion modifier that comes in hit play and they're being forced to the ground and then they're interacting with our objects so if I then bring in a X particle as dynamic objects fluid effects this is our fluid solver these will start behaving like a fluid not looking right yet but we're getting there so there's our fluid kind of so here's a tip with fluids if you ever want to create a fluid simulation where the pour is really important so pop coming out of a can or beer out of a bottle or tea being poured out of a pot and you need a nice accurate pour before it becomes the pool never just use an emitter on its own because in the real world water particles don't just appear from thin air and fall to the ground they are always poured from something and it's important to have that that spout to give you the correct movement movement so I'm just going to do a very basic one let's do a tube and we'll do it um what do we do we need the plus Zed yeah so this is going to be our spout so it's way too big obviously so if this wants to be similar to I'm just going to eyeball it because we don't got that much time let's move it up and we want it to be we want the emitter to be kind of in the end of it and then we'll bring this inner radius down so it's just a little bit wider than the emitter so this is going to be our tube let's make the emitter a child of the tube and then now obviously we can move up wrong we can move this around and the emitters going to stay where it is so let's move this into the area rotate it down and of course we need to collide a tag on the tube otherwise the particles just going to fly through it so we can just hit control and copy that one onto the tube so they're coming out still not looking right but there is our flow and we've got some got a bit of leakage so in the emitter we're going to change it remember we did that hexagonal emission mode for the grains to make it a really efficient uninteresting emission let's do that for this as well and I'm going to reduce the radius to have more particles would you sit more one not ten there we go and we can reduce this speed and then we can add a little bit of friction no bounce and let's move my tube nearer to our area and now we're starting to get something that's that's looking like the fluid should in our emitter just going to change the display mode so at the moment every particle is just being born green and it doesn't look very fluid like and that's because it's a single color but I can change this and color them via a gradient so now I've got a blue to white gradient and I couldn't I can which parameter that gradient has been assigned to so if I color them according to the particles speed what this is saying is particles that are very slow are going to be blue and particles they're very fast are going to be white and as a result you get you get a more fluid look and if I change the display to say circles filled now we're starting to see that it's looking a little bit more like our fluid and if you wanted to have got low to control over this fluid we can just leave it as it is really but if we wanted to have some more random movement we can add another motion modifier like a turbulence and this is going to start making it move a bit more erratically giving it a bit of movement you see it's kind of the turbulence is pushing it around and we're getting more splashes as that turbulence is animating and if I put that really high it obviously is making it go wild we can see the effects of the turbulence pushing those particles around so obviously way too much in fact we'll just turn the turbulence off because we don't need it all right so that's our basic fluid sim then how do we start well let's mesh it first before we do the fire so fluids what you do with it is you simulate the particles first you mesh those particles to give you geometry and you render the mesh and we'll use our X P open V DB measure to do that so that our generators V DB masher and all we need to do is drag the emitter into the masher so let's drag the emitter into the source and it makes this blobby source so we need to reduce the point radius which is like a radius around each particle that is too high bring down the voxel size we'll make the particles invisible and we could smooth this and make it look nicer obviously for production but there we've got a mesh it's generating in real time creating nice quads let's make it and they've got our look at that realistic larva or what but there we go and this so this and this meshes been generated in real time it's making quads and it's moving pretty quickly so very nice kind of visualization okay let's just switch the mesh off for now so I've just been throwing these X particles objects into this scene and quite and it's suddenly the scene it's not very organized as it and if your mansion if you were building this on your own and you had 50 X particles objects and you handed it over to another artist that'd be like what on earth is this mess because it becomes quite difficult to read so we've got a new tool in the latest release which is fantastic just for that so all of these X particles objects are in our object manager if I want to sort them I just go to the X particles menu and go XP system sort and it automatically puts all of the X particles objects into the subfolders so we've got a folder for dynamics with our fluid effects we've got a folder for our emitter our generators our meshes are in there and our modifiers have been put in here and suddenly we've got all our X particles items in a really organized system so then another artist gets it they can read the scene and find out how you've done it so it's a super useful technique right so let's make let's create fire from our fluid so we need our smoke and fire solver so if we go to the dynamics menu that was created for us we can go to this dynamics objects and choose the one we want and we want an explosion of X which puts it into our system so now we have got our explosion grid this is where the fire is going to be solved inside here so I can move it up and it's always a good idea the fire is solved adaptively so it doesn't try and solve the entire grid it just tries to solve the areas which it needs which makes it quicker but it's always a good idea to try and kind of change the bounds of the grid to make it as small as you can get away with and usually you'll get a more efficient and more efficient solve all right so now what we need to do is tell the explosion effect grid where's the fuel coming from how we're going to make this fire and this is the beauty because we made our liquid our particles we can just put an explosion tag on the particles and make fire from them so we'll get our emitter word tags X particles tags and put an explosion effects source and the only other thing we need to do is give it some fuel so go into the emitter extended data physical data and put let's just say to fuel again and just hit play on the defaults if I moved my emitter ah okay so by doing the XP system sort I have unparent 'add the emitter from my tube so be careful of that gotcha what I'll do is I'm going to put my tube into there and then I'm gonna select my emitter and I need to reposition it back into the tube otherwise it's not going to react correctly so bear that one in mind when using XP system sort okay let's start again so now the particles for our fluid are emitting fire they're moving their way around and we are getting a fire simulation in our sim now there's a couple of errors aren't there we have got fire fire intersecting this tube now what you can do obviously is select set up at a Collider object on that tube to prevent the smoke from escaping but here's another bit of advice if you can ever avoid doing that do because it'll make your fire solves way quicker and fire haven't assault for colliders is very heavy on the on the processor because it's having to make so many calculations so for this scene I'm gonna do what I like to do is a lazy cheat and I'm going to change the art direction and make it a sliced gully and then I don't have the problem so the last thing I want to show you so there's our there's our scene and it's okay but we can have more control now you can see that the fuel is igniting immediately because every particle has got a fuel value and as soon as it gets in the explosion it makes a fire but what if we want the fire to only start igniting once we get down to about this bit well we can we can do that we can control it so what we're going to do the way I'm going to do it is I'm going to go in the emitter and I'm going to remove all of that fuel data that I gave it let's put it to zero so now it can't emit any fire because it's not got any fuel data it's not going to work and I'm going to use a modifier to give it the fuel and then I've got control over when it happens so if I got the modifiers and I'm gonna go to control and I'm going to control the physical properties of the particle and I can go to fuel set the fuel value and I'm gonna set it at 2 so now this should behave in exactly the same way as I did before they should just emit fuel straight away because the modifiers giving it in it there it is so here's the cool thing we can control it by mapping this data I'm going to go to the mapping tab add a map this is within the physical modifier and what I'm going to say is take the fuel value which I've set here as 2 and put it in this this term this F curve so the fuel value is on this y-axis so here it has a fuel value of 0 and here it has a fuel value of whatever you've defined here which is 2 and this x-axis is whatever parameter you choose here so if I put age and put say 30 frames what it's saying is at frame 0 it has zero fuel in the particle and when a particle becomes 30 frames old it has the value of 2 so I'm just going to make it obvious by putting it up here so now what should happen the fuel starts at this point now because we've got the water is behaving like fluid and some of its sloshing back we're still getting some smoke at the top of the sim but you can see it's there it's appearing after this 30 frame value and data mapping is I said earlier on if you don't use groups then start learning and utilizing the use of groups and your X particle scenes data mapping also gives you so much control over the manipulation of your particles and all of these so I'm using age but look at all of these different data sets that we can use to affect how modifiers change particles movement it's just it's this almost limitless it's fantastic and so that's the basic setup and that is the technique that Mario used to create this render so what I want to do is just shut this one down and show you one a different version which has a breakdown at the end of it which them displays some other techniques that was used so here is the rendering question all are the same exactly the same techniques that I've just demonstrated for you and then you'll see a breakdown with the individual part so here is this fluid sim meshed with our VDB measure set on fire with explosion effects when all of this is rendered in cycles 4d so there's the smoke and fire pass we've got this the sparks pass now this is a really interesting technique so remember we were talked about the that there was that the kind of the molten metal that then had congealed on the mold in the render so the way mario did that was we've got a particle paint tool which means you can get a mesh you can create an emitter and you can paint particles onto the surface and it will respect the surface normals of that mesh so you can paint them over any part of a mesh you can define the color the radius how big or small the age if they disappear or not if they grow on and then you can mesh those with the open V DB measure and if you have it all selected you can actually paint them on in real time it gives you fantastic artistic control over over where you want those particles and here we can see the result of that so obviously much higher resolution but we've got these wireframe kind of a blobby rican jeweled bits of steel done by painting it we can put complete artistic control over where they over where those are put up and here are the wipes with the various different parts of the render and so three or four years ago you'd be able to produce something like that obviously but you'd probably use three three different pieces of software or at least multiple plugins to have to do various different elements in the same scene but now with the latest X particles for working inside of Mac's ons r20 there's a massive amount that motion designers and even VFX designers can do inside one application without having to move around so it makes it hugely quick and hugely versatile so that's pretty much it from from demonstrating the techniques but I just wanted to announce that if you are an already in X particles user and you have X particles 4 which was the one we released before Christmas time last year the brand new update will be available as of next week which is the update which will work in cinema 4d are 20 this will initially be released as part of our beta early access program which everybody has access to if you're a next particles customer so you go to our website and city am limited and it's all the information how you get it but that'll be released as of next week so you can use it in our xx and then there will be a full release production build released on the 1st of November which is obviously fully supported it'll be used in render farms offline capabilities and that release with the R 20 compatibility will be ready the 1st of November if you're not a next particle user and you're interested there's a free trial of a month fully functional trial so you can install it have it working loads of free tutorials on our youtube channel as well to get you started and so I'd urge you to go to our website get that detail and get up and running because once you've tried it and you've got hooked it's like crack there's no going back right thanks very much [Applause]

Channel: Maxon

Views: 21,796

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r20, release 20, bodypaint 3d, maxon, 3d, animation, rendering, ibc, ibc 2018, presentation

Id: SaJuO3Z9_lg

Length: 49min 27sec (2967 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 26 2018