Welcome to this beginner-friendly fusion particle tutorial for motion graphics. In this tutorial, I will show you how I use particles instead of keyframes to move graphics around. It will be a very simple animation. I just use three particles and two types of forces to let these balls move around. And then if you understand this, you can also use images or graphics, vector graphics, and let those move around through particles. When thinking of particles, frequently people think about dust and explosions and stuff like this. And yes, I did this tutorial four years ago, but that's not all you can do with particles. You can also use them as an animation concept. And that's what I want to show you here. I am using the ResolveCon logo because I presented this idea as part of a motion graphics workshop live at this year's ResolveCon conference in Portland. This session itself was not recorded, so if you missed it, sorry about that. But I am just presenting this one particular idea from the workshop. You do not need the logo yourself if you want to follow along with me. Let's start for my blank frame and let's get some particles moving. Since I have the ResolveCon logo, I use it for inspiration and I first of all want to replace these three circles here with particles. And if I open up the logo, I have all the polygon shapes here. So I can at the end, I can just disable the merges for these circles to deactivate them. So I've polygon shapes for each of these three circles. But before I do this, let me create the particles and set up a particle system. So under Effects, you find a section in the Fusion Tools, Particles, and you find all the particle tools. And most importantly, we need to create particles and then we need to render particles and in between creation and rendering, we can manipulate them through forces. So this works via P emitter to create P emitter or P image emitter, two options, but I'll just use the emitter for individual particles and then AP render node to render those. And the render node can either output the particles as a 2D image or as a 3D geometry which can then work with 3D camera and other 3D tools. I'll keep it in 2D. It's often simpler, quicker to set up on for motion graphics. It's often very useful. In 2D, I have image settings for my image output and I can look at the image output and see here the particles. I have my viewer set without the checker underlay, by the way. So if you enable this, the checker underlay, but particles, usually it's easier to see against black. You can also do a long left click here on, off. Good. So actually I don't need Ultra HD. Let me divide this by two to make it match with what I have set up for my logo at the moment. Just an HD image for now. Let's have a look at the logo and you see there are lots of particles here coming in on every frame. We get new particles and that's because the particle emitter is creating particles on every frame by default and by default creating 10 particles. But I will just start with one particle. So I put one here and this is one particle per frame. So I will animate this to create only one particle on frame zero. So I animate this here on frame zero. Then I go to frame number one and on frame number one, set this to zero so that no new particles are being created. There's one tiny particle down here if you see it and it's there. And then it vanishes because we have a lifespan set to 100. That span is great for particles to fade out and vanish like in smoke and stuff like that. Or sometimes for performance reasons if you have a lot of particles. But here we don't need it. You can just put it like to a high number so they don't vanish during the time of the animation. I will immediately go to the style tab to make my particle a bit bigger and more visible. So instead of point I could use for example an ngon where I can set this to a circular shape. I can also make stars and all kinds of stuff in here. And we have size controls where I can make it larger and I can go beyond the limit here. The arrow keys or just type a number and make it larger. I also want to control better where it's being created. Right now it is being created within this red circle which is controlled by the region tab. So we have a region yet set to sphere but sphere in 2D is just a circle. So this sphere is a size and if I bring it down I can exactly control where the particle is being generated otherwise it's randomly generated within the region of the particle creation which makes sense for lots of particles. For one I can just set it like this. And then I want to put it here and adjust the size and the position to match one of these. Let me go back into the style where I also have the color controls and I can sample colors here for example red. Actually let me also open this. You see here in the windows control you can also bank colors for later use and can pick as well from here. So let me actually bank all of these so that I can use them later because once the particle cover them up I can't pick them anymore. So it's just easier to have some colors here stored that I want to use in the animation. Maybe even the logo in case I want to use it later. So just keep those and then use them as you need those colors. Let me set this to red first. Make the size larger and I make it red because I still have the contrast while adjusting the size and then when I know that the size and so on is fitting I can just set it to blue. So this is my one particle. Now I will copy this and paste it again and will create the other particles. And particles if you do output over output in fusion you always get a merge node and if you do that with particles you get a particle merge node which just brings those two particles together and now we have two particles and I move the second one over here and change the style to red. And then I do this one more time. These are my three particles. If you have seen the animation at the beginning, you saw that I had them fly around and then come together in this place. That is actually extremely difficult to set it up that way. So if you have flying particles all over the place, you want to kind of force them to come together and to end in a specific place. To manipulate this with forces is very difficult. What is much easier is to do it the other way around, let them start in a specific place and then shoot them in different directions. So I kind of build my animation in reverse and then I will switch the time and let it run backwards. That's my plan. So starting from here, I want these to accelerate. So at the end of my plan, I want them to slow down into this circle. So I will do the opposite. I will slowly accelerate them. To accelerate, you can use a directional force, which I will just add after this merge node. So it applies to all the particles and the tool for this is the P directional force from up here. And you know, I will just close this now. So we have more space for the screen and the directional force you see by default, that's the particles fall down and I don't want to be distracted by the original logo now. So I will now do what I announced earlier and we'll deactivate the original part of that logo and work now on the forces. My directional force points downwards. So by default, this simulates gravity. If you change the direction, it goes upwards and you know, it shows immediately where it goes even after some frames. So you don't need to always run the entire animation. You can just go to some frame, change the forces and see what happens. So what I will do is I want to give them a small push to fly up and then they will get faster and faster because the force keeps acting and we don't have any air resistance or anything here yet. So this will just keep getting faster. I just want to give them a small push and then kind of stop the force and then have another force counteracting so that they first shoot up and then fall down. That's the idea. Here I will just animate the strengths. So after I have pushed them enough, my rocket engine stops and I set the strength to zero, just over one frame. And they will keep flying, right? Because they still have momentum, they keep going. Unless I counteract this with another P directional force and I'm bringing it in now from the shift spacebar menu. And you see this one is now pointing downwards and we see the combined result. But now I can adjust the force. So I will adjust the upward force to be a bit stronger and I'll change the angle so that the combined force is doing what I want. Okay, almost, maybe that's still a bit more than I want. Let's say one eight. Let's try this. See how this goes. Yeah, that's what I want because I want these particles to kind of fall onto the logo and then I want them to bounce around. And what do we do to make particles bounce? Well, we introduce a force called P bounce. And this one is simulating any form of barrier where they can reflect off or where can they bounce off. Under the region tab of this, we decide how this barrier works. And the default is line and you have here like two control points and then you have a line between them. But you can do this in 3D with measures and spheres and all kinds of stuff. In 2D, something simple is the Bezier, which gives me here these polygons blind controls. And I can just make a surface and I'll make it a bit uneven to add a little bit of variety. And then you see what will happen. If I have this, you see my particles are bouncing over this surface and I try to adjust it a bit so that they don't just keep moving in this direction but are flying a bit back. Yeah, that looks better. There are more controls here. For example, one major control is the elasticity. That's like how much energy gets lost during the bounce. So if you set this lower, then they with every bounce, bounce a little bit less and then stay there. Or if you do it in reverse, you can even bring it above one, then they gain energy as they bounce, which is not physically realistic, but could be fun if you later invert it, right? So now they get bounce higher and higher. And there's more that you can impact here like a surface roughness and they can slide along a surface and all kinds of fun stuff. We don't need all of this today. So I will just keep to the default setting here. Last part, just I will turn this around and a quick way to turn an animation around is to introduce a time speed or a time stretcher, both works. So in this case, let's add a time speed and set the speed to minus one, which means go backwards. Let's see. And we can set a delay if necessary, but I think that's pretty much what I want to do. For the second part of the logo animation, I let all the letters like dance around. So there I'm no longer replacing the image with particles, but I am attaching images into particles. Let me show you how I set this up. So if I take that vector graphic apart, you see here I have all the individual components of the vector graphics. So I have here like the circles, and then the letters, each letter over one background note. So I set it up like this, just took the graphic apart. And then each of those images, I feed into one particle emitter, which you can do here as soon as you set the emitter in the style to bitmap. And then once you set it to bitmap, you get the additional image input. And then afterwards I'm merging all of them together like before, each letter here is its own particle with an image input. And then I'm just merging all of them together. And then I have a directional force, which in this case is just the default, the gradient, which lets all of them fall down. So if I disable the bounce, they're just all falling down. And then I have a bounce here at the bottom. This time I just have a simple line, a region line, and they just bounce up again. But you see that they bounce in different ways, and that's because I put some variants into the bounce. So they experience different force. And then I did one more thing. I wanted them to kind of fall through the bottom at the end. And you see there's an animation here. And starting from here, I animated the conditions and all the particle tools have probabilities assigned, which makes sense if you work with lots of particles. Not all of them have to experience the same thing. So you assign a probability that something happens to the particle. And here we have a probability, which is just reducing. And the probability that the particle will bounce reduces and some particles still bounce. Some no longer are caught by this because of the lower probability until the point where it goes to zero basically, and nothing bounces anymore and everything falls through the bottom. Pretty simple, right? So just another idea of thinking when working with motion graphics, rather than doing key frames, if you wanted to do this with key frames, it would take forever, right? So instead I set up particles where I describe movement in a different way rather than saying move from A to B. I say experience this kind of force and see what happens. And then it's easier to randomize things and stuff like that. So it can give you quite nice ideas for moving things around. Okay, I hope you enjoyed this. As always feel free to like, subscribe and say hello in the comments and yeah, take care. Cheers.
