Trapcode Particular 3 Training | 06: OBJ Emitters

hi folks Harry Frank from red giant here in this tutorial we'll be talking about obj emitters in trapcode particular now just so that we're all on the same page an obj file is a 3d geometry file I think it's safe to say that any 3d application that you would want to be working with would support the ability to export its geometry as an obj file once you've installed the trapcode suite you would be able to import obj files now we don't have to go this route but the trap code suite does contain an obj plug-in that allows you to directly import OBJ's into after-effects now just as a quick aside here if you've upgraded your version of After Effects and you simply migrate your plugins by moving the plugins from one folder to another you will miss the obj parser and it will not be included so it's always a good idea with any major update to simply reinstall the trap code suite so that you know you're completely up to date so that said let's show you all about obj emitters I'm going to do this inside the designer window so in particular an obj is simply one of the many emitter types it's the very bottom one down here and once I select this we've got a little warning here saying that we don't have an obj selected so there's nothing for it to emit from now you can locate your own OBJ's but particular ships with a pretty extensive obj library so I'll load in a generic shape here like this cube now because particular is a particle system even though we're generating particles in a shape what they do from there is immediately start moving you're not going to see a very well-defined shape so for illustration purposes I'm going to take this velocity down to zero I'll click back on the emitter type of block so we can take a look at our obj options so in the case of a cube if I'd like to scale it up or down I generally would want to keep a cube locked in its dimensions with XY and Z this is why the emitter size is going to be locked by default but you can unlock these and scale XYZ individually also get this from a different angle here now particulars going to randomly generate particles along certain areas of the geometry and we can define that and I'll talk about that in just a second but if I'd like the particles to be more densely filled in our shape I'll go to the particles per second and turn this up to fill in those areas so right now you can see that it's actually rendering particles along the edges of this geometry and down here in our obj emitter options we can tell it to emit from edges which can be useful we've also got this vertices option which isn't quite as useful because it really is only generating at the corners of the cube so below edges we have faces and we also have the option to render inside the volume of the obj now this one goes pretty quickly but just know that when you select a volume option particulars going to do a quick calculation of the obj itself to calculate that volume because volume is not something that's included with an obj file that has to be manually calculated by a particular so if you're working with more complex shapes it might take a few moments for it to actually generate the volume now as I've shown you before we've got block presets that ship with particular if I double click on this and go into the emitter type you'll see a little subsection here that is pre-made obj presets I just wanted to talk about what the difference is with this when I load a block preset that contains an obj it's containing all of the information that you would find in this section such as the particles per second emitter size as well as where it is emitting from if I reset this go to the emitter type obj and just browse the library all I'm doing is defining the obj file that is being used as the emitter the obj blocks are simply a quick and easy way to load in all of the settings that you would need for that given shape and also if you save one of these blocks back to the bleib rarey let's say I go in here and I change us two edges and I go in here and I say save this block and I hit B this will be stored in my custom section down here with the rest of my OBJ's if I'd like to add my own obj to this library I can click on to choose obj to load the obj library and then in the upper right you'll notice an ADD obj option so you could load your own OBJ's in here it will generate the thumbnail and if I double click on this it'll load that obj and assign that to the emitter take note that it is not managing the media file for you it's going to leave it in the original location so if I go in here to my custom OBJ's and I select show in finder or show an explorer for Windows it will reveal the original location of that obj file this isn't the only way to get OBJ's into particular it's just the designer way of doing things I'll hit cancel and show you another way of working with this like I mentioned you can manually import OBJ's and this is including obj sequences so we can have a sequences of events such as this running sequence of this horse so if I select the first obj in the sequence and you'll see that it is trying to import a obj file sequence and I can open that which I've already done but I've done a second time I can drop this into my composition go to particular emitter obj model vga emitter sections select the 3d model and in this case I'll select the horse obj sequence now with sequences you have to keep in mind that particular is generating particles at the points or edges that it sees at that given frame and then those particles immediately start moving so in the case of an obj you're not going to see a whole lot of definition and you got to really think about how you would like to use particles coming off of a moving obj sequence so in this case I'm going to rotate this on its side so that we can get a better view of this and not look at it from the front and I'm gonna overlay another version of this just to illustrate what the actual sequence looks like without the particles constantly moving so I'm going to use trapcode form to show exactly what this looks like because form can also work with obj models so if I go in here to my base form and select obj model and I'll set the obj to the horse sequence I'll rotate it on the same angle as I did the other one and I'm gonna lower this particle density so that we don't see way too many particles let's create a camera here a little closer to our objects so in particular I'm probably I'm going to want a lot more particles actually looks like I yeah I set these to two different angles so this one is going to be 90 degrees that way so we are using an obj we are uniformly emitting them if I set this to directional the particles are going to shoot to the right by default I'll go into the velocity and turn the velocity to a negative direction I'll lower the size a little bit and probably lower the lifespan to maybe one second I'll also go to the size over life and have these fade out or scale out over time so in this case we've got the 3d model that we can see via form and then we've got particles emitting off of it sort of like a mist or smoke or something like that so this is the point that I was getting at when you are using particles emitting from an object that changes over time you really need to think about how it is that you want those particles to behave and what kind of look you're going for because a particle generator like particular isn't going to retain a solid shape that's reliable from frame to frame the remaining options you have in the particular obj emitter options are really just for utility OBJ's are sometimes inverted or backwards and z space so to get them normalized with your 3d scene like for instance if you're importing a render and z ends up inverted from your after-effects space to your rendered space you can invert it here there's the sequence speed here to dictate how fast the obj sequence is playing so a default value of 1 is basically a one to one ratio from frame to frame it will advance one file in the sequence and you can also offset the sequence over time the normalized checkbox is generally something you'll leave on this will scale and position your obj to be around the center of your emitter and that about does it for OBJ's within trapcode particular my name's Harry Frank for red giant we'll see you in the next lesson [Music] you

Channel: Red Giant

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Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, gaming, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, final cut pro, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, pluraleyes, particular, mir, movies, video, training, how to, diy, maker, iron man, ilm, vlog, blogger, content, youtube, creator, vlogger, vlogging

Id: L4E3GKQLnrg

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 19 2018