Particle Nodes EXPLAINED! - Blender 2.9

oh look who came crawling back to me for another blender tutorial you're addicted aren't you you need to inject yourself with the blender tutorial every day to keep yourself alive you're just completely hooked onto stuff well don't worry i will give you your daily fix because today we are going to be talking about particle nodes this is a feature that has been promised for a very long time and it's still in the works and the basic idea is in the same way that the shader editor uses nodes to create the material so it's node based very soon particles are going to be replaced with a node based system as well and this is going to be rolled around in the future versions but right now we're using the 2.91 alpha to access these features so it's probably a good idea to adapt before we get left behind we'd need to learn node based before you know it's the only option so let me be your shepherd let me be your guide and we're just gonna get through it very quickly i want you to open up blender duh if you didn't open up blender you're probably not smart enough for this tutorial um either way again 2.91 alpha this is only in the newer newer newer blender versions you're not going to find it in the older ones um once you have the alpha or whatever what i want you to do is go to edit preferences and then in interface you're going to see developers extras is disabled this is because they don't want you wielding this power particle nodes is only for highly trained specialists like ourselves so to enable them because right now they're not enabled you're going to need to enable developers extra go to experimental and then and by the way experimental is not enabled if you don't have developers extra so go to experimental and enable the new particle system once you do this you are going to see a new editor type so if we go here you're going to see something called the simulation editor which is basically like the shader editor but it's nodes specific to particles so how do we set this up how do we make a particle system well long story short we are going to split the window so that we have both the 3d viewport and the simulation editor and just like in the material editor you need to create your material or no tree that's probably the better way to think about it so we are going to create a no tree this is where our simulation is going to live and then you're probably thinking how do i apply you know whatever nodes i put here you know particle output whatever how do i apply these nodes to my object well it's not that simple so what i'm going to do is i'm going to add in also a new object type you might have not known existed so shift a and you're going to see something called point cloud this has nothing to do with photogrammetry and like having a bunch of vertices for your book point cloud this is literally just particle point cloud so once you add in the point cloud object what you need to do is go to the modifiers you're going to add in a simulation modifier if you don't do these steps it's not going to work add in your simulation modifier we then need to say okay this object is using this modifier but which simulation no trees it using well we wanted to use this one so i'm just going to select that one it's going to be the only one available and then for the data path being you know where are we outputting these particles and in fact you know this is the node for that so shift a output particle simulation you could have multiple of these specifically we want this one so i'm just going to control c control v so now you know disappears which basically means it's ready and long story short we have created a simulation tree right now with nothing in it except for the output node and we've created the particle point cloud object which is going to inherit all the stuff that we do here okay so now the question is how do these nodes work how do we get a basic particle system going well you're going to see that this particle simulation this is kind of like the material output node this is the final destination the final node we want to plug in emitters into here this is where the particles come from we want to plug in events this is what the particles do and we want to plug in forces and this is the forces it's the um i don't know a synonym for forces but it's the effects in some sense that drive the motion of our particles so this would be gravity this would be like having a cube emit the particles and this would be like change the size of the particles or have them explode or something okay so first of all for particles we need a emitter so shift a and you're thinking where are the emitters think about it oh there it is there it is it's the it's the year it's in the emitters and um you're going to notice that a lot of these nodes have the word mock-up which basically means you know they exist but they don't really do anything and a lot of these menus have quite a bit of mock-ups so we really have no choice except particle mesh emitter because the other one is a mock-up so yellow goes into yellow so we've added a emitter type and for the emitter object what is going to be shedding the particles we could just add in a suzanne and make that the particle thing and you can see if we hit play you know particles come out of it so far we don't really have much control over how this happens like it just kind of goes out everywhere maybe we want this maybe we want this coming from the surface or the volume or just kind of like coming out with a different velocity right now we can't control that but it is being emitted from the mesh and you're going to see some you know very obvious stuff they could play around with like the rate if we bring this down to one it's going to be shutting particles very infrequently very infrequently and as we make this bigger it's going to be more and more particles and this point cloud thing is kind of like the bounding box for our particles and the whole idea of particle nodes by the way is its procedural fine but it should also be running significantly and i mean listen to me listen to me significantly faster than the old particle system so we might even be able to see some of that here so we can just change the rate of this to something crazy even like 5000 and that's shedding a bunch of particles but i'm still doing this real time and everything's fine okay now one thing that is kind of a new idea it doesn't exist in the shader editor or in animation nodes or anywhere else this is a new idea so i need you to get used to this it's not necessarily one branch goes to one you know i don't know what to call this like input you can actually have multiple nodes going to the same input so i'm going to duplicate my mesh emitter i'm going to duplicate my object as well so that we have two monkeys so this mesh emitter is going to be for suzanne number one and the second mesh emitter is going to be for suzanne number two so you can see this is suzanne suzanne001 and i'm going to plug both of these into the emitter so this is not a thing that's normal for blender having two branches going to the same input of the same node but it is here and you can actually add a bunch of different emitters so now we have two emitters that are kind of independent of each other like we can have one outputting at a rate of like four thousand uh so this one has a very dense output and this one only has a hundred and they're completely independent from each other and it's procedural and it's great so key idea multiple branches to the same input so we have our emitters uh what about events again this is what the particles do well for an event we just shift a we look at our events we see that this one is a mock-up so we'll just go for particle birth event in other words this is an event that's going to happen when the particle is spawned so it's going to happen immediately when the particle is made so it's kind of like a property of it so i'm going to connect the event and then it's basically saying okay whatever i'm going to plug in whatever i'm going to execute is going to happen exactly when the particle's made well what do i want to execute we'll go to your executables and you're going to see we can do something like set particle attribute set particle attribute is a very kind of weird node it's kind of like vertex color or the attribute node more as a better analogy for that i don't know what i was thinking with vertex color attribute node in the shader editor is very similar to this where you can type in your attribute data paths and actually extract that data so for example and this is a example i've seen in another tutorial so i'm just going to use it whatever it's mine now we can change the radius in other words the size of the particle which is a float meaning it's a number it's not a vector or color it's just a number it's the radius so i can control the radius and have that be our executable which is now going to you know when the particles spawned in other words all the particles are going to have this radius which we can change procedurally but we don't want it to be too big so i'm going to set it's like 0.1 and reset the simulation there we go so you can see we can make a new particles be bigger and something i really want to emphasize is if i change this right now right in the middle it's only going to affect newly spawned particles because it's an event that happens on birth so particles that have already been emitted and are already traveling not going to be affected and again because this is a procedural approach there is no reason why you cannot animate this so let's have it start at zero keyframe go up to 60. let's have it go to one keyframe and let's play this so you can see the particles that are being spawned get bigger and bigger and bigger it doesn't change the size of the particles that already exist but it changes the spawn properties and you can see that's pretty cool already and of course we can just like the previous thing we can have multiple events go into the same thing i'm not going to talk about many other events because right now there just aren't many and the ones that do exist are mock-ups um so finally let's talk about forces and let me actually just delete these keyframes and keep it at a nice point one uh clear keyframes okay so this is what we have right now uh we can have forces which again affect the motion and how these uh particles interact in terms of physics so let's add in our forces shift a forces well seems like we only have one option so let's use it a force is something that you plug in here so blue goes to blue magenta it's a magenta these are kind of like printer colors actually it's a cyan magenta yellow that's interesting either way a force is basically like something like gravity or wind or vortex and if we take our z component the up and down and set it till i got a negative one it's going to start reacting like gravity so negative 9.8 for you physics nerds that's the proper gravity number depending on your you know scene size and all that but don't worry about it so we can have a force that we can have it goes sideways on the x-axis or the y-axis whatever and all of this is procedural at any point we could change the size of this or change which emitters we want so maybe we don't want the second suzanne emitting anything so now we only have one suzanne emitting and it'd probably be easier to see if i make that less intense so now this suzanne isn't emitting anything but if we add in if we add in our second suzanne put that as an emitter now they are both doing it something interesting you can do with the forces is you don't have to have it just be a vector but you could have the vector driven by a object so i'm going to delete the second suzanne as our emitter and for our basically our vector our force vector this set of three numbers what we can do is we can use something called and i'm going to need to remember where this is so just give me a second it's object transforms basically this takes a object like our second susan and it outputs its location if we put this in here that basically means that the force is going to be determined by the location of our object which means it's going to look like it's think about it attracted to the monkey we move it it's going to be moving with it so you know that that's kind of a kind of a neat idea or you could have multiple objects like a second suzanne we add in this other one as the transform and we could do a bit of vector math something like something like adding these together and maybe also i mean adding them together is pretty good it's almost like an average so it's going to go somewhere in between them kind of so they both have influence if i move this very to the left it's going to have influence if i move this very down it's going to have influence but yeah these are kind of the key ideas i mean we could mess with a lot more truth is we don't have a lot of nodes right now so maybe it's not worth it but hopefully you understand these ideas about emitters events and forces and that this is a broken thing right now um in fact this crashes quite a bit and we are lucky that it hasn't crashed during this tutorial anyways this is the the birth the birth pun intended particle birth this is the birth of particle nodes i'm excited to see the future of it maybe uh next update we're going to get a bunch of more working nodes and we could do a bunch of cool stuff with texture splatter and i don't know hopefully you enjoyed this crash course if you did the best way to support this channel and cg matter default cuban cg matter is via the patreon uh patreon is a way to keep these channels afloat also it is a way to get something in return you can get behind the scenes access discord access exclusive tutorials that's kind of like the big one you could get tutorials that are not available for free and that's the good one um and there's also project files so the blend files i use for different stuff um but it's also a great way to support this channel so um if you enjoyed i'm glad that you did people that want to be patrons thank you i appreciate it it's very nice that you chose to do that although you are getting something in return link in the description if you're interested try to keep these things at the end um yeah that's the show i'm done

Channel: Default Cube

Views: 47,642

Keywords: blender, 2.9, particle, nodes, simulation, update, tutorial, cg, 3d, vfx, cgi, node network, explained, beginner, basic

Id: EnHdTPd0a4s

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020