TRAPCODE SUITE | New Features in Trapcode Particular 5

[Music] hi folks harry frank from red giant here in this tutorial i'd like to walk you through what is new in trap code particular 5.0 there is so much to cover but i want to cover a very specific section first as that will allow us to visualize many of the other features that i want to show and that new thing is called emit from parent system particular previously had a feature called the aux system where particles became emitters for other particles within one system the limitation was that you could only have one aux emitter per system we've done away with the idea of the aux system in this latest version particular's new emit from parent system makes it possible to have particles emit from an entirely discrete particle system now to accommodate this particular now allows up to 16 particle systems in the same 3d space where it was previously eight the quickest way to load what is the equivalent of the old aux system you can go to your basics category of your presets and locate the preset called aux system legacy now be careful here if you single click this will replace the system with that preset being that this is meant to be a child emitter of another system you're not going to see anything so let me undo here so to load something like an aux system or a child emitter you're going to want to hold down alt or option and this will append the preset to your system single click will load to the preset option or alt click will append the system and like i said this loads the equivalent of the old aux system settings in the previous versions of particular now i tend to use a different set of settings for this and i've actually saved these in here under the preset called aux system new so let me undo one more time and i'm going to alt click on this and load this preset and the difference here is that it is set to inherit the color from the parent particles using a slightly smaller particle size a longer life span of the particle everything else is pretty much the same okay so to demonstrate these child emitters and the benefit of using them along with a couple other new features i'm going to set up some fireworks here i'm going to use a grid emitter and we're going to have several points along which we will emit sort of fireworks with trails and we'll have them explode now i'll quickly set the velocity to zero so we can see the formation of the grid i want one particle in y and maybe eight particles along the x and we'll expand this out so we'll have eight points along which we can emit particles and have fireworks shoot from them and i'll lower these a little bit i want these to emit in a directional manner so if i turn up this velocity we'll see that these are shooting in all directions at the same time i'll set this to a directional emitter and by default they always shoot away from the camera so i'm going to tilt them upward so that they're all shooting straight up i'll set the particles per second to actually a very low number i'll set this to maybe two we'll see if this works now before we get too far in the grid emitter section there's a new feature called random and what this does is instead of emitting either in one burst or emitting sequentially along the grid it will emit randomly on the grid now this isn't very exciting yet let's turn up the velocity so that these are all shooting a little more quickly i feel like this needs to be closer to three or four hundred okay so we're shooting particles upward in the air let's add some color let's say i had this preset right here and i'm going to add some particle trails behind these and i'll set this up from scratch rather than load a preset so you can see all the things that you need to do so i'll create a new system by clicking on the plus here in the emitter type i'll set this to emit from parent system i'll bring the velocity down but maybe not zero because we want them to scatter just a little bit in the color i'll set this to color from parent one hundred percent i'll set the blend mode to screen and maybe we'll set the size over life to scale down so we've got particles and particle trails shooting out from a random grid if i want more fireworks i can simply go to my particles per second start turning this up now there's another cool thing i want to show you at the end of the life of this particle so when that firework sort of dies out i want another explosion of particles so i'll add another system and here i'll also set this to emit from parent system and emit from the primary now rather than have it emit continuously and it's actually waiting to catch up right now i'm going to force this back to the beginning by clicking this rewind button and that actually resets the calculations and simulations so rather than have them emit continuously like this i'll tell it to emit at the parent end of life and that's another new feature so when the primary particle comes to an end it will emit another set of particles now i could set this to a new color i could also have it inherit color from the parent particle maybe i'll do that now i'm going to have another particle system emit trails from system 3. so i'll add another system set this to emit from parent and in this case we'll use parent system three this will also inherit color from the parent we'll set the velocity maybe to one blend mode to screen and i'll set these maybe to a size of one so as you can see this new tool that we have available where we can define any system to emit from any other system or even multiple systems emitting from a single system this becomes a very powerful tool now what the setup needs is some gravity and wind and other physics settings on the particles and that's where i'd like to go to next let's talk about the physics section and what we've added and what we changed the newly renamed fastphysics section in particular contains physics functions that render very quickly and these are what we often refer to as particle emulation behaviors instead of particle simulation behaviors a good example of something that is a simulation is something like fluid dynamics so if i enable fluid motion here in particular fluid dynamics needs to pre-calculate all of the data that affects the particles and all of that data is stored and then applied to the particle motion over time so simulations need to pre-calculate and store the information emulations can simply figure out where a particle should be only based on the passage of time and this is how particular has worked for many years and although it is very fast rendering it doesn't result in very realistic physics behaviors so that's why we've renamed this fast physics but you'll be able to apply much of your understanding of the fast physics to the new physics that you'll find in simulations and the environment section for example the turbulence field here when i turn this up turbulence field is a three-dimensional fractal field that the particles move through but again particles simply are being temporarily displaced but they continue along their original motion path so it doesn't need to simulate anything or cache any of the behavior it can simply temporarily displace the particles and then keep moving along the same motion path now let's make sure we're all on the same page when i talk about a fractal field when we're talking about a fractal field we're talking about 3d fractal noise now fractal noise is really just standard layers of noise and each layer is scaled up larger than the last one this results in a much more complex noise pattern so fractal noise has really nothing to do with actual fractals but we're using a similar method that fractals use to composite different layers of noise together to make a more complex pattern and a 3d fractal noise is just the same idea but apply it over 3d space so if you think of fractal noise as an image those darker areas can push particles in one direction and lighter areas can push them in the other direction or they can affect things like particle size or rotation so inside the fast physics section we have this turbulence field we have different ways to affect different parameters such as size opacity or position as i turn this up we'll see that the particles move through the field but they continue along the same path that they were traveling now if i reset that and i go to the environment section i'm going to turn up air turbulence effect position now this is very similar in concept it's still using a 3d fractal field but as it moves through that field the field is actually redirecting the particle paths permanently so let me turn this up and if we play through this you'll see that it has a much more natural kind of look to it now before i go any further with the environment section i want to back up and go over to the particle section and talk about particle physics i'm going to reset this and i'll make one system that's fairly colorful and i'm going to turn up the particle size and i'll use a preset so that these scale down over time previously in particular particles actually didn't really have any mass so as we pushed things around due to wind everything was affected the same so now in particular we have this particle physics section and i can define particle mass so let's say i turn this mass up to 100 in this system i'll add another system and we'll leave this at the default of 10 and i'll just leave this as a white particle now in the environment section as i turn up the wind and push this to the right by using wind in the x you can see that the white particles with the lighter mass are being pushed to the right whereas the more massive particles are not being pushed as much now the physics the explanation here is that we are applying an equal force to both of these sets of particles that force is the wind so the wind is being applied to both systems at the same time and this the reason is system two has a blank block here so it's inheriting the environment settings here so both systems have the same amount of wind force applied to them because they have varying masses they will accelerate differently now how does this work with gravity so let's go back to my environment settings and reset this and i'm going to turn up gravity gravity is also a force of acceleration now in our perspective gravity is a downward force but really it's the force between two objects when we simulate gravity in a particle system we're just really saying the attraction of the mass of the particles to the mass of the earth and the earth is pulling them down now in physics gravity is a constant everything accelerates at these same rate regardless of the mass the reason things fall at different rates is generally because of air resistance so again in our particle physics section we have something called air resistance larger objects tend to have more air resistance than smaller objects so let's say i turn up my error resistance for my larger particles and we'll see that the colorful particles are accelerating more slowly and the lighter particles are accelerating more quickly i'll show you one more thing here let me reset gravity turn this wind back up and you might notice in here that we have something called size effects mass as well as size affects error resistance this is local to each particle system in fact i'm going to turn off system 2 and what i'll do is turn up size effects mass and what you can see if i turn this mass up we're going to see that larger particles accelerate more slowly smaller particles accelerate more quickly effectively smaller particles behave lighter and that's exactly what size affects mass is so it's not a substitution for your mass control it works in conjunction with it so that i can say smaller particles within a system will behave differently than larger particles within the system and you can have particle variation by a size over life graph or by introducing something like size random and as you can see as i turn up size random the particles react differently also note that if i have air resistance always set to zero wind will not have any effect on my particles in fact there's a warning that comes up that tells you that you must have air resistance greater than zero however mass can never be equal to zero particles always have to have some sort of mass one last thing i'd like to point out here is the drift parameters that we have right here are what used to be called wind in prior versions of particular drift does not take into account the particle mass it is simply a tendency for the particles as a whole to drift in that axis that you specify one great new useful feature that i'd like to point out in the emitter section is something called velocity over life now this is really useful when you are using shapes such as 3d models or text emitters when we are using an irregular shape like this i can never actually see the original shape if i have some velocity because the particles are born at the surface and then they immediately start moving i'm going to turn up the particle count here what velocity over life allows you to do is define the velocity inheritance of the particle over time so with this graph i can define the beginning to have no velocity and then have it slowly accelerate over time this makes it a lot easier to see the shape let me zoom in just a little bit this is particularly useful for doing bubbles or underwater effects where you'd like the bubbles to cling to the surface and then move later on in their lifespan so i can set this up by going to my emitter direction and setting this to a directional emitter and having this emit upward you can see with the velocity over life that the particles cling to the surface and then eventually start slowly accelerating upward because of the graph that i have set i can also set this to an actual bubble sprite by going to my sprites here and i can load a sprite such as this one right here while i'm on the topic of sprites i want to point out that we've consolidated a lot of the options in terms of sprite selection we used to have both sprite as well as textured polygons in previous versions of particular as well as options to use the original color colorize or fill now everything is just a sprite and if you'd like to colorize it you can use the colorize feature right here or fill it using the color fill right here this isn't particularly useful with a bubble like this but if i go into load perhaps a 2d shape i'll pick a solid like a hexagon in my particle options i can set this to fill using the color so let's load a color map here or if something has no color such as this grayscale cube here i can set this to colorize and this will colorize the grayscale image i'll set this back to a 2d image and whether or not they are 3d versus 2d is defined in the option to face the camera right here if i uncheck this then my particles can behave as three-dimensional textured polygons and i can rotate these in all three axes while we're on the topic of how older physics behaviors work in particular i like to talk about bounce physics in particular 5.0 bounce physics is now found in the physics simulations group i can enable bounce physics simply by clicking on enable bounce and i can select a 3d layer for my particles to interact with i've got a square solid created right here and i'm going to define that as my bounce layer so i'll go into my bounce layer number one and define this bounce layer it's going to use it as an infinite plane first which is why you already see them bouncing off of the surface but i'll set this to layer size so that will respect the size of the layer and i'll go to the emitter and we will rotate this so that it points right at the solid now you can see that they are bouncing using the collision event so they can either bounce you can have them simply disappear or be killed they can stick to the surface or they can hit and slide now doing this version is also the ability to see the results of the bounce layers right here within the designer so if you'd like to do some tweaking here in the designer you can do that and i'll do just that i'll actually go back to the environment section and turn up the gravity and now that we see particles hitting the surface they slide and then they get pulled off due to the acceleration of gravity let's add a little bit of color to this and i will add a particle trail just to make this look a little bit more interesting it'll lower the particle count just to have this run a little bit more snappy now for years with particular people have asked for the ability to use these bounce physics with other physics properties within particular and it simply wasn't possible and that relates all back to that stuff i was talking about emulation versus simulation balance physics to work in conjunction with other things like turbulence fields and 3d fractal fields we have to run a simulation there's no other way to do it now in this version of particular we can actually do that so bounce physics is one simulation and it's running that simulation right now if i go into my environment and start turning up things like air turbulence we can see that we can add that or if you want the simpler version of using the turbulence field we can also add that so turbulence fields air turbulence bounce physics gravity and wind all of this stuff can now work together as particular 5.0 has been written from scratch to run things as simulations rather than emulation now i do need to point out that although you can run bounce simulations at the same time as meander as well as flocking fluid simulation can only be run on its own and not concurrently with any other simulations and you'll notice when i enable that all of my other simulations go away so let's get to some new material as i select this simulation group you might keep seeing this thing called flocking i want to talk about that right now because this is a really cool new feature so let's reset reset my camera before i demonstrate flocking i'll make a couple adjustments here i'll set this to a different color so that when i add another system i'll have some opposing colors i'll set the size to a little bit bigger so it's easier to see i'll set the emitter type to a sphere and turn up the size a bit so we'll get a nice large area in which we can visualize our motion also i'll set the velocity to zero so that the only motion that we're going to see right now is through the flocking simulation now flocking refers to a group motion or ordered motion of the group where the particles will move with an awareness of each other they can maintain an attraction with each other maintain a little bit of separation with each other and align towards the same movement and move towards the same goals and i'll show all this in just a second but first let's enable flocking now within one system the flocking motion of that system primarily is defined by these first three settings here and i'll zero these out so that we can see what these do the attract parameter defines their tendency to move towards the center of the group or be attracted towards that center point so they will sort of orbit in and out of the center point of the group now separate isn't necessarily the opposite of attraction but it is more of a tendency of the particles to push apart at very close proximity so you'll notice that as we start this out there's less movement out here at the edges but where the particles are more compact they are pushing against each other it's sort of like a spring attached to each individual particle and as they get close they kind of push against each other note that this separation works within one system but with other systems as well so as i turn up separate and particles encounter other particles with flocking simulation on they will also push against each other a line is a little bit more difficult to visualize in a very simple setup like this but it is the tendency of any given particle to align and orient along with the particles nearby so all of these things attract separate and align come together to simulate what flocking or swarming motion is in the group and as i drag this emitter around we can see that we've got the sort of flowing swarming kind of motion to this in fact let me turn up the attract feature to make this a little more apparent so let me drag this around and as particles move they kind of swarm and flow in and out of that center point and push against each other now i briefly mentioned that flocking is not only an awareness of the particles with each other but they move towards the same goals now part of that happens with this stuff called predator prey behavior but i'm going to skip over that and go to this other really cool feature called target attraction and this is the tendency for particles to attract to a 3d point in space right now it's at the very center point so i'm going to move this over in the x just a little bit and as i turn up the target attraction the particles will tend to attract to that point in space as long as they can see it now as i continue to move this target position to the right you'll notice that the particles kind of give up and the reason is this range of view right here this is how far any given particle can see if that range of view is too small to see the target it won't move towards the target in fact let me turn up the particle lifespan here and turn down the overall particles per second so i'll move the range of view back up and as i turn this up we'll see that particles again start to be attracted to that point i'll enable an aux system here just so that we can see the overall motion paths so what's really cool here is that this is dynamically calculated as i move my emitter around particles will have this tendency to be attracted to that point as long as they are close enough to see it another way to define common behavior within a group of particles is to define predator prey behavior now to demonstrate this i'll move this first system over in the x just a little bit so i'll put one system over here and then another system over here and we'll have them interact with each other so i need another system here to work with i'll simply duplicate this primary system and change this to a light blue and these are all existing in the same space so i will move this over in the x-axis maybe a thousand pixels i'll also draw a trail behind this system three by alt clicking on that system and i need to define this to use system three and now we're drawing a nice trail behind the blue particles looks like this is off center just a little bit i'll push this over in the x-axis now if you were setting this up and noticing that the particle motion is actually very similar between the two of these they are actually sharing the same random seed right now so for system three i might want to go in and change this random seed value so that they don't share the exact same overall motion so to have the orange particles be attracted to the blue particles i'll need to define the orange particles as predator particles i don't need to do anything for the child emitter in fact i very much don't want to do this because all i want to do is have them trace out the main particle i don't need to run the simulation for this group at all in fact you really don't want to do that because it becomes very render intensive so i just want that primary system and then system three which is drawing the particle paths here for the blue particles i'll set these as prey particles so the tendency will be for the orange particles to move towards the blue particles and for the blue particles to move away which is exactly what's happening now if i just wanted these particles to be attracted to the prey but i don't want the prey to actually go anywhere i can simply set the prey evade to zero now the orange particles will simply swarm around the prey particles so as you can see here predator prey behavior isn't just for setting up predator prey simulations in some sort of nature simulation predator prey behavior and flocking in general is simply the language that we use to describe particle attraction and how particles can move towards common goals how particles can be attracted or repelled by each other and how they can move toward targets so now that we've got the basics of flocking demonstrated i'd like to show one of my favorite setups here in particular i'm going to create a grid and set the velocity to zero i just want sort of a zero motion grid of particles in fact i'll set this to be a explosion of particles so we just have one burst of particles and i need to make sure that the lifespan is going to be long enough to have the particles sit there for the entire duration 20 seconds should probably be enough so i really should just see sort of a grid of particles i'll adjust the size here so if i set this to xyz individual and i'll make this sort of a rectangle and maybe 32 by 24 or maybe a little bit more let's say 48 by 24. so what i'm going to do is have one single particle over here be attracted to a point that moves it through this grid that that particle is going to be a predator particle and i'll set the grid to prey particles and i'll have all of these prey particles evade that predator particle and sort of scatter so next i'll make another system and this is just going to be a single particle for right now i'll just make this something that's easy to distinguish i'll set this to a blue we'll make this pretty big and this will also be an explosion of particles so using the explode behavior and if i set this to 30 with a frame rate of 30 i should see just one single particle emitted i'm going to uncheck this position relative to primary and just kind of adjust this using its own individual set of coordinates so i'm going to move it up and to the left in this sort of upper left corner of the grid and in the simulations here i will enable flocking i'll zero everything else out because i just want the motion of the target attraction and i'm going to move this off screen so i'll move this maybe to let's say 2200 and we'll move it down i'll turn up the target attraction to 100 and i'll need to increase this frame of view until this particle starts moving somewhere above 2000 we should start to see some tendency of this particle to move towards the target attraction and there it goes so let me back this up and we can kind of see the direction it's heading i'll move this down in y so that it's kind of cutting across the diagonal of this grid looks like i need a little bit more life span on this particle so i'll set this to 6 and that's the basic motion we're looking for so the grid doesn't need to do anything and the single particle is just going to cut right through the grid so now with this blue particle i'll define this as a predator particle and in the grid i'll define this with flocking i'll set this to a prey particle now i need to zero all this stuff out because it's got a lot of additional motion going on here and as i play through this now the particles are starting to evade i'm going to narrow down the range of view quite a bit let's set this to maybe 100 so they're only evading in very close proximity to that particle so now it kind of has that look as if this particle is kind of cutting through the group which is really cool now the grid motion is pretty basic it's just moving away from the particle we don't have any additional sort of flowing organic kind of motion now this is a perfect demonstration of why we have one other thing in here that i haven't demonstrated which is called meander so if i wanted some added random motion to this if i went to air turbulence and turned up position this is going to immediately start moving all of my particles so it's just going to start pushing them all around same would go for the turbulence field if i set this to effect position it's just going to immediately start affecting all of the particles and this is not what i want i want them as they are pushed by other forces to have a sort of random orientation and movement and that's exactly what meander is so as they have movement or are pushed by other forces they will have their own sort of heading that is kind of randomized and again moved through a 3d fractal field so as they are affected by that predator particle they have a lot more randomness to their movement now i can trace out a path of these particles so i can simply go to my aux system new and have another system inherit the movement of the primary now this is continuously drawing particles from that grid whether or not they do anything and i'm going to let this catch up but there's actually a better way to go about rendering these if i go into my emitter type instead of saying have them emit continuously so because right now we have particles emitting on every single grid point i can set this to emit from the parent speed so this is only going to emit particles that are actually moving and this is going to render a lot quicker so let's rewind this hit play and as i see these push through it is emitting particles and drawing them along that path now for this system three the particle trail i think a little bit of velocity actually is going to help here let's run some finishing touches here by applying a little bit of a some variation of color and there's a really cool subtle feature that i haven't shown yet which is when i set something here in the primary and i want everything else to use that same setting if i right click i can say apply this value to all systems so if i want all my particles to be using a screen blend mode they will all be doing that now it might make more sense for this blue particle to actually be some sort of sprite particle so i'll go here double click on this and we'll load it as a sprite and then maybe from our sprite library we can load something out of 3d geometric shapes and maybe use this icosa so this is a super fun setup to do there is a text preset that actually shares a very similar setup which is called text slice and what this is is a particle that kind of pushes through the text and as the particles of the text interact with that predator particle they push apart and do lots of meandering and ear turbulence and it's a really fun setup so that is flocking here in trapcode particular 5.0 along with all the other great new stuff this is a tremendous release it was so much work for so many very talented people and i hope you really enjoy using it my name is harry frank for red giant thank you so much for watching

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 59,945

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, final cut pro, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, pluraleyes, particular, mir, movies, video, training, ilm, vlog, blogger, content, youtube, creator, mograph, software, plugin, postproduction, post production, trapcode particular, trapcode mir, trapcode tao, trapcode shine, trapcode particular 5, trapcode suite, trapcode suite 16

Id: d3Ox7OZdXgs

Length: 36min 24sec (2184 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020