What's New in Cinema 4D 2024.4 | The 4 Hour Complete Guide. All New Particle System!

[Music] hello everybody it's chrism from Rock alasso and welcome to the most epic 4-Hour tutorial I've ever made this is the what's new video for 2024 point4 of Cinema 4D and it is huge there is so much stuff to talk about I'm going to go into pretty much everything in depth and especially the particles particles have 2 and 1 half hours 2 hours and 45 minutes worth of content by themselves so this is absolutely crazy I've got a couple of housekeeping details that are really animportant first of all we are going to be having from the time that this video comes out all the way through NAB there's going to be a 25% off NAB sale for all the rocket lassle plugins and stuff that we have for sale on gumroad so check the links below to get the details on that in addition to that I'm going to be presenting for Maxon at the NAB Booth I'm going to be talking all about some particle stuff some stuff I teased out in this video so be sure to tune in for that as well uh something to mention is I tried to go for a 4K resolution in this video and Premiere can't edit it on my computer so I had to shrink it back down again it was a giant pain I've spent so much time trying to get this video put together it's absolutely insane uh also uh the live streams have not begun properly yet because I'm kind of in the process of trying to get a new machine I was trying to wait until the new machine arrived but that hasn't quite happened yet so that's why that delay happened and now of course NAB season and what's new video season and that takes a very long time to put together now there are a bunch of cool new Fe creatures involved in red shift but I am not going to be talking about any of them I don't even mention them so make sure you go and check out EJ's video cuz he's going to be covering a bunch of the new stuff in his video and lastly oh yeah uh the live streams will be back today if you're watching this video when it's brand new I'm going to have a live stream today make sure you tune in at 2 pm central time and I'm going to have some special guests from Maxon if everything goes according to plan thank you so much for watching and let's Jump Right In to Cinema 4D 2024 four moving directly into point four let's take a look at our first category and that is miscellaneous all the things that didn't quite fit into another category now closing the scene file you see I got a figure here with a red shift material on it moving over to the asset browser we can then click on the hdri folder and inside we got all the hdrs I can grab any one of these and drag it directly into the viewport now and it'll automatically create a dome light and feed it directly inside and even better we can grab any other image and drag it and it will automatically find our dome light and replace it so it's a really quick way of getting these previews instantly getting feedback on exactly what it's going to look like by testing out different hdrs directly in our scene so a pretty handy little shortcut there and sticking with the asset browser let's open up a scene file here is a kitchen file that you can find inside your asset browser and what I would like to do is add some additional models into the scene so let's click on models and we can go and track down any models from this category that we like you know what I'm going to do I'm going to do a specific search this is something we've been able to do for a while I'm going to say I would like to do other and say dependency and then we immediately type in the word red shift what it's going to do is find every asset that has red shift as a dependency meaning everything here is a model prepared for red shift here's the actual new feature though is I can grab any one of these items so let's grab this bottle of wine and I can drag it from the asset browser into my scene give it a second and we're going to get a little preview of the item and instantly the place tool was activated so if I could take this bottle of wine put it on the corner of the counter and it will fully load in and there we go we've got the bottle of wine the place tool was automatic I can rotate that to some other angle we could scale it if you haven't played with the place tool it's very handy something that's really cool is you can hold down control and drag the place tool and that will make a duplicate of Whatever item you have and again we can place it on any other object here let's put this on the table instead and maybe scale it a little bit larger there we grab other items so let's grab maybe one of these ferns here and I'll drag it in scene and in this case you see it's a lot larger but I'm going to move into this fruit bowl and try and place it you see it's picking up these angles so I'll put it right there give it a second to load in now this one has different lods so if I click on it I can say I want it to be the full model and we'll get that final plant so the placement tool automatically activating whenever you drag in any model into your scene pretty handy and always remember if you have a specific search that you can do you can set that as a favorite or some sort of default clicking this drop down we can go and say save as smart Search and say that this is my red red shift search save that and now that's been saved and at any point I can click on the drop down go to smart searches and there's my red shift one and it'll automatically go and do that search for me so super handy along those lines clear that out and close that down and let's move on into another scene file this time let's open this one and we've got some new mesh checking features here's an old model I made I'll select these legs I already prepared this for the demo go to polygon mode you see lots of polygons now this was created a while ago using a lot of nested bus but now if we into mode go to modeling there's a mesh checking we've had that for a while we can activate it you see we got all these different meshes you can see I got a bunch of bad geometry here things like open boundary edges bad polygons non-planar polygons lots of stuff going on but now we have the ability to also activate and show triangles so I could deactivate all these other ones and now we're seeing only these highlighted triangles if you click on these double arrows it will actually select all of those for you and then we've got end guns and it's going to show those end gun so lots of G created here I can select only those so if you want to do some sort of function directly on your triangles or directly on your end guns you can now get their count and automatically select all of them now you notice they are off by default and that's because they're not actually bad geometry they're just extra details you might want to get access to so again pretty handy next up we've got an update to the smoothing tool the smoothing edges tool so we've got our old friend the elephant here I'll make a few selections here hitting U I can draw out maybe a little path where do I want to do it let's do a little path along the ear right there and I'll make a second selection here maybe have one travel down the ear like that now there's no shortcut for it but I can right click and go to smooth edges right here and immediately you'll notice a new keep spacing checkbox so I'll turn that off so we can see the traditional one if I click and drag you see we get nice smooth curves on those what that's doing is it is actually like moving the distance of these points sort of in whatever way is going to make it the most smooth but now we can say keep the spacing and you'll see we get a different look if I hit undo and drag it you'll see that the spacing from that edge to that edge between these two points is going to try and maintain that length so it's going to create even more controllable curves I got another example here though let's click on this plane you see I've already got this piece of subdivided geometry just a fancy plane and a U-shaped selection so right click and go back to that smooth edges turn off keep spacing and you'll see as I drag that these are really getting spread out you see it really blatantly there so as we spread them out keep on going and going and going obviously it's making a nice smooth curve there but these have really gotten stretched out now alternatively we can say keep the spacing and then when I click and drag it's going to maintain that spacing and only the areas I could actually move are going to change so just a nice additional setting to have there next up I don't have a specific demo scene because I tend not to import or export from Cinema but there have been updates to gltf and the USD file formats for importing and exporting now the gltf will support rigged animation and importing posor animation also called blend shapes and other software and when it comes to the USD it is added support for the PRS animations next up is one that I'm excited about because it is the addition of a new field and we haven't had that in a while so let's open up a new scene file here and keeping it simple we'll move to our asset browser go to all and I'd like to grab some motion capture scrolling down I want to grab one that's got a very blatant bit of Animation let see maybe this Run and Jump yeah that Jump's got some nice animation that would be handy so I'll just drag that into our scene file I don't want that running forward animation so I'll just yank out this animation and delete that Mo track hitting play you see that I've got this running character and he's just staying in one position now if we go to our timeline give ourselves a little bit more space with it you can see that we've got all these different tracks lots of crazy animation going we'll keep it simple I just want to check out the position and specifically the Y position of the hips and you'll see if I were to select just the hips here you see these hips are have got this moment where they jump up into the air and I think that's going to very clearly show this effect so what do we actually want to do well let's create a sphere and with that sphere let's set it really tiny I'll say like one so a very small sphere and then create a cloner holding that alt so that the sphere's inside of it I just want one clone so I'll say one by one by one and I did that inside of a cloner just so I could control this with a field so now to manipulate it we need an affector so creating a plain affector what would I like this to do well under parameters I don't want to affect the position but I would like to affect the scale in a uniform absolute way and what I would like to do is say that this sphere can get to be 100 times larger now it automatically gets applied right now it's a plane field it applies to everything so now we limit when and where is the animation going to get applied we do that through the fields Tab and I would really love if more people start getting into Fields because they really are so powerful so this new one is in the middle category these are our field layers and you'll see we've got this track if I select the track it's going to be fed in and everything disappears because it's currently outputting zero you'll see that the settings are really simple and straightforward the main thing we need to do is import a animation track so if we grab our position y I can drag that directly in and Link it and now you see it is returning a value now the main thing that this is doing is it is outputting A Min and a Max based on whatever value this animation track is outputting and then remapping it to some sort of output so 0 to one that would be equivalent to 0 to 100% so there's a really handy button which is recalculate inputs and as soon as I click on that it is now found the smallest value and the largest value and it's outputting it from zero to 100% and now you'll see when the character jumps that's when the sphere gets the largest so depending on how the hips are moving up and down on y we're getting a direct onetoone correlation between between those bits of Animation it's a little clearer if you click on your track and go to your F curves so you can see this is the animation and every time we hit one of these Peaks you can see the spear is getting way bigger back into the plane back into the fields I'll turn off absolute value although I don't think any of these values ever go negative but typically I don't think I'd want absolute value on if it goes smaller then I want things to get tinier so yeah that is directly animating from there but there are two additional modes I'd like to talk about now let's pop open an example scene file I've got here and what I've got this time is a little rocket ship so very simple little chibi thing and there is an animation track here or rather a align to spline and it's set to this spline which is being generated from this mesh getting converted via my plug-in mesh the spline and then getting smoothed out but ultimately it's just the spline going back forth so inside of this track I have key framed it and let's go to the F curves so you can see that way I did this said it's going to go from 0er to 100% but I kind of had it go flat and then accelerate and then go flat and then go faster and then go flat and up so there's sort of these little steps so if I were to hit play you'll see that this rocket is going to kind of sit there and then accelerate and then slow down and then accelerate so it's going to give us some nice feedback here really blatant this time let's grab this plane effector and it's going to be controlling this cloner that cloner has a simple cone inside of it almost exact same concept with the sphere we just did this cone is going to get Scaled bigger or smaller depending on this plane if I activate it you can see that the plane is saying hey scale that up to 15 times the size on Z so you see it gets super long so inside the field let's drag in a brand new track I'll move it to the bottom we'll turn these on in a moment and set that to normal so what track this time well the position of anything that animated so I'll drag that in and this time I don't want to do value I want to do a velocity the faster it goes the more I want it to do something so click on velocity click recalculate inputs I love that this button is here and you see that this value doesn't get too high it never goes too fast in any given moment so it goes from zero to3 but when it goes up to03 we're now outputting one or 100% so now if I hit play you see that the rocket flame is very tiny when I hit play as it accelerates suddenly the flame gets longer and then slows down and then it's going to get longer as it goes really quick so now based on the velocity how quick your object is moving you're going to be able to drive any parameter yes I'm driving the scale here but it could be any parameter you could be driving the colors of something so yeah that zips around but there are even more features inside of it nice and clean though we've got an offset now this offset is in seconds not frame so keep that in mind but let's say I want to take I know like a quarter of a second maybe a little bit less I'll say 0.2 and offset that and what that means is it's going to actually offset the animation that it's viewing and play it in this case a little bit ahead of time so what that means is the Rocket's going to take off and go really fast what I'm going to say is yeah but before that happens have the flame begin to grow so play a play now before the rocket really goes fast you see the flame began to grow and before it slows down the rocket already starts or the flame starts shrinking so we get a nice consistent movement through the whole thing and we get this perfect onetoone correlation between the movement of the rocket and our end result of the scale of the flame again very controllable but of course you can always have fun and start layering things on top of that this is all raw information that Fields can use so in this case I added a delay effector and you can find that in your modifier layers and if I activate that you see it's just a smooth it's going to make it so that that flame doesn't just pop out or disappear super quickly it'll sort of fade in over the course of a little bit of time so that will help and then I made a random field which is just an animated noise and I multiply it and that just gives that flame a little bit of Jitter animating like kind of up and down so when it's big you see a little bit of flame jittering on and off so yeah the ability to combine this on top of other fields very very powerful now there's actually one more mode inside of the track so under type we have value velocity and acceleration so moving on into this example file I actually racked my brain for a while trying to figure out a good way of demoing this but there's a way that everybody experiences acceleration and that's when driving in a car so very similar setup I've got this car and around this track is just a big circle spline and I've got a aligned to spline tag that's going to be driving the car forward now it does go from 0 to 100 but it's going to go up and then backwards and then forward and then backwards and finally settle back at 100% so what are we going to do well I've taken the entire car and I put it inside of a fracture that way it's being viewed as sort of a single clone from a cloner so now I can drive it very easily with effectors so here is a plane effector and this time if I activate it you're going to see the entire car body is tilting forward why is that well this time I am not driving the scale I'm driving the rotation just the rotation P 20 forward so whatever this says it's going to be tilting forward or backward now I'm exaggerating the rotation just so we can see it really clearly but let's move into our fields and tell it when this should apply because right now it's all the time so inside of here why don't we grab a brand new track and this time we want again the position to drive it so let's grab the position grab our tilt again I can actually link that in properly and this time the type is going to be acceleration if we click recalculate input actually here's something important to note if I click recalculate inputs you get from 0 to 2.93 but I'm going to turn off absolute value and click the recalculate inputs again you see we get a different number and I do want these numbers to be able to go negative and not always return the positive value which is what absolute value would do for you now something I found is even though we're accelerating faster than we ever decelerate I want these numbers to be even that way it's really clean for me to know that the car can be centered so this is a little bit specific but in this case I'm going to say it goes from neg3 because we're really really close to three to positive three and then we're going to Output from in this case you see we get 0 to one but to balance that out I'll say negative 1 to one but we actually see a problem if we do that so I'm just going to fix it immediately if you go into your remapping we're going to tell it that the minimum value can go negative so we're going to say minus 100 back to layer now we can go from zero to one and you see now the car looks balanced out so minus 3 positive3 mapping from 0 to one and it's going from essentially negative 100 to positive 00 via this remapping so let's rewind hit play and check out what we get from the car it's going to begin accelerating you see the whole car tilts backward and then when it gets to the peak it's kind of even out and now it's decelerating and keep in mind you don't decelerate when the arc is going down you're going backwards when the arc is going down you accelerate when this curve starts going more and more steeply up and you start decelerating when the curve starts being less and less steep over time and you see as we break or back up the car will til forward and as we accelerate the car will tilt backwards so pretty powerful to be able to build this type of rig but again we can layer things on top of it so right now that can be maybe a little bit harsh as the animation it does ease in and ease out here but let's add in another one of those lovely delays and this time we got some smoothing so I'll say 25% smoothing and add a second one and this one will make springy and that now you can see that the car will actually have some spring to it as it breaks it kind of has a little bit of wobble as it backs up it's got some more wobble you could pull back on the springiness you could increase the smoothing I like renaming them like this one should probably be spring just so I can tell them apart but here you see I was able to layer these up keep in mind that when it comes to Fields these are just like Photoshop layers we can combine them in so many different ways we could have it be that there's some sort of earthquake and every time that this accelerates or decelerates it's multiplying the track on top of maybe a noise field so lots of different combinations but here's a very straightforward example of acceleration and deceleration on a car and just because the Wheels not spinning is bugging me we can activate I put all the wheels inside of a different fracture and now I can activate this plain Spin effector and that's the same thing I'm now saying to rotate a whole bunch I just guessed that I just eyeballed what looked good I'm going to say hey take the value of the position and map it one to one and rotate this much and all that means is as the car via the same animation it's going to make the wheel spin at a certain speed and I can just change this number to make them spin faster or slower but they should perfectly correlate with how far the car has gone forward or backward so again fun use of this brand new field and I'll always be happy when I see new Fields added to cinema next topic is going to be property transfer now I've got a single handy dandy file in order to check out all the different ways of using the property transfer so what is the very first way well we've got this skull this is from the quickel bridge and I brought this over so here's a skull now here's an exact copy of the skull and I am going to apply the remesher to it all default settings so activate the remesh and it should already be cached because I did it earlier so you can see that yeah it's cached and by default even in older versions of Cinema you can see it actually does a really nice job of transferring the materials over onto the other model but you'll see that with this brand new mesh you know these are all triangles got nice quads over here but you can see we got this really big Jagged area right along the skull that one's obvious but they're actually all over the place you see there's another one right here there's another one along the top here so it was only able to do so much in that transferring and that does show up even in the render let's pop open red shift and hopefully my computer doesn't explode recording at the higher resolution and rendering at the same time give that a second and yeah you can see that those actually do show up here in the render but we don't need to wait a long time for those to complete all right so what do we have now well let's activate this next remesh now this one I lowered our mesh density to push it even further to show this but let's activate that remesh and look at that I don't see the seam anymore and why don't we see the seam that's because of this transfer attributes so if I turn that off you're going to see that none of the information is getting transferred over but if I keep it activated then now we're going to get lovely lovely translations I guess as recalculate it's going to get lovely translations of all the different properties from one mesh to the other one and again now with this even super low density mesh you see how it's translated the materials over open up red shift again let that chug for a second so you can now see on the new mesh that we don't have those here we get those seams but here we don't so way cleaner translation from one model to the new one and this is super duper low poly now but this is applied in other ways as well so let's turn that off and in a lot of ways what we just witnessed is sort of a parametric version of what used to be called Vamp so let's show that off here you can see I've got a skull right here and I've got a completely different mesh remeshed there but it doesn't have any information you see right here is the remeshed one there's no UV tags there's no material and on this one I even had this vertex map I've made that's kind of showing all the different highlighted areas and then all the concave areas so I want to transfer all that information to this completely unrelated mesh for all purposes so let's open up our character manager and then you'll see it's no longer called Vamp it's now called property trans ER let's activate that and we've got a source and that would be the original one and we've got our new one drag that in as our Target we would like to transfer over what do we got we've got our vertex Maps our UVS and our material tags is going to go to the nearest surface it's the space is local but actually I don't want to do nearest surface I want to do that really nice nearest polygon with data breaks which was another new feature added in the previous three version of Cinema and you see the space is local so even though these are offset by each other they're they're going to calculate relative to each other not based on the global or World coordinates so I click transfer maps and you should see it's pretty dang quick and now we've got a perfect transition from one to the other close that out and now you can see I can grab this new vertex map and it's been transitioned over grab this UV map well you can just see the UVS are applied correctly here and the material has been translated over as well so Vamp renamed to you know be a little bit more sensical but it is not limited to that either we could actually do these translations pretty much automatically parametrically as well so deleting out let's delete all of these now I want to put a UV tag on there let's just grab uh one off of say this Cube so we know it's completely wrong apply that onto that object but now you'll see inside the UV tag as I select it there is now a new setting called use transfer if I activate that I can now transfer from a source tag so I can say hey link to this other tag where looking at and you see we got those same settings from the property transfer from the dropdown where it's based on the local it's a transformation we we can change the evaluation method but it's already with the data brakes so that's looking great to me and that should already be translating automatically so if we were to grab that material and apply it from a UV tag that came from a cube you'll see that the material is now perfect because it's translating those over in real time so if UVS Were Somehow changing on this object they'd be adapting on the other one so apply appes to UV tags it applies to vertex Maps color weight maps I mean pretty much anything that you see underneath the property transfer here so it's going to be the joint weights and morphs and vertex colors all of our selections so like a polygon selection we could do a live polygon selection on one and transfer it to the other one to the closest approximation all of that live transferring the data from one to the other so that even though this is not the flashiest feature I feel like we're going to end up using this a lot and it's going to do a lot of problem solving for us in the future especially in future live streams moving right along let's talk about partition Ivy and capsules okay now if you'll indulge me for a moment we're going to be spending a bunch of time talking about stuff inside the assets browser here let me pull up a bunch of the new things to start out with what is a capsule well as defined a capsule could be maybe a material it could be a model it could be an entire complicated rig built with scene nodes and that's the stuff roasso focuses on now you'll notice that a bunch of these things have a Maxon One exclusive icon on there to the best of my knowledge there's a completely separate team at Maxon that's focused on developing all of these things that end up in the asset browser those things just couldn't exist if it wasn't for a Maxon one subscription so it's a completely separate thing now there's always a lot of comments on the videos and Maxon is not monitoring my comments if you have any thoughts about that stuff you should always head on over to help go to your Maxon support and you'll be able to go to this window and you can scroll on down and you can create a ticket or you can share your ideas but what I want to do is in a fun exciting way talk about some of the new stuff that is in there I have spent a bunch of time working on some of those tools and I'm excited to share them with you so let's move right on into talking about that stuff now first of all you're going to see there's a whole bunch of new plants there's a whole bunch of new models for European plugs but what I want to spend some time focused on is let's search for the word rocket lasso and you're going to see a whole bunch of different presets here these are all different example scene files I've put together and down here you can see different tools that we've made and you will see that of course some of them are Maxon one exclusives now we're going to spend some time talking about the new Partition modifier and the new IV generator so why don't we begin with the partition modifier hopefully it's pretty intuitive to use I'm going to create a brand new plane let's drop this down to one by one segments and let's immediately drag this tool and drop it directly on the plane so immediately you should see something happened always keep in mind you can hit shift C and search for something like partition and it's go pop up right there in the menu as well you can drag it directly onto your object now we're going to go through these things very quickly because there's example scene files already here in your asset browser and there's going to be entire videos on civity going through like every single parameter but the basic idea here is we are going to be taking a bunch of geometry and subdividing it in some interesting ways grabbing the partition modifier the first main setting is going to be the cuts and you can see I can drag that all the way down and we can add one cut then a second cut and a third cut and just make as many different cuts in here as we want you see you get these really cool subdivisions happening on the plane or any geometry we could drop this instead on a cube and you're going to get those subdivisions on there we could even drop it on something that's got a bunch of triangles maybe in this case let's create a iosa hedrin drop it on there let me hide those and you see that's going to be subdividing all of those triangles as well so hopefully pretty straightforward you can drop on any geometry and get some cool different looks on there now we got additional settings on here things like the random density so if pull that way down actually the best way to do this is pull these all these main settings down until you start getting very even distribution and then you can kind of test each parameter individually so we can change the number of cuts we can crank this up you can see that's going to choose the next spot to cut kind of in sequence and eventually we'll get what looks like a very even number of subdivisions you see there pretty even all around so then we can start saying hey randomize the density meaning it doesn't necessarily have to cut the biggest piece so as I drag this up further and further and further you see that we're going to end up with tiny pieces and bigger pieces same number of cuts but they've been distributed differently completely unrelated get rid of all that back to being even we've got randomized cuts and what that will do is offset them in space you can see even here you get this very coherent transition from one shape to another so it's essentially sliding each cut from one spot to another so very different distribution now combining those two now we are squishing and moving them around via offsetting them but then we can also change the density so you get like really tiny sections of really large ones so those two can visually do similar things but they're actually technically very different and lastly I've got the skew setting where we can actually offset all of these and you get angled cuts on there now there's a bunch of different ways of using this tool there are so many additional things as well we can go into random animation I can drag this up and it's kind of like the random Cuts but this one if I hit play is animated all these will be sliding all over the place this is just raw geometry chopping it all up it's pretty cool because it will maintain your UVs so if I were to make a new material actually let me search for the word UV under materials actually rather media and there's an image down here I like using there this one so I'll drag this over to make a new material drop that on our object and you'll see that let me get rid of that shininess so you can see that the UVS are being properly maintained but we've got some other modes in here where you can go to um your UV mapping and say do this per polygon and it's going to map it on every single one of the polygons and you know like said lots more settings lots of different things we could spend time talking about you could put additional gaps in here make lots of changes but where things get really fun I think is the idea that you can start layering this up let's get rid of that Gap and by changing these settings we can do things like Say Hey I want the cut orientation to be manual now you can see that it's kind of randomly choosing to put some of them on the horizontal and some of them on the width if I drag them all over here they're all cutting horizontally so that means I could decrease the number of cuts here and right now there's all animated Randomness we can say hey randomize these cuts a little bit get a little bit of random offset and then I'll duplicate my partition modifier a second time and now I'll say okay now I want to cut them all on the width and now you can see I'm starting to get these planks I've got one set of controls that are controlling these angles and the first one created all the ones traveling up on Z so the ability to layer and layer and layer these on top of each other and get very cool customized looks for exactly what you want it to be that's where the exciting part comes in a lot like Branch where the the layering is where the power comes in so that's pretty much as far as I'm going to go with it in this video there's so much more to talk about so many more settings and cool things that you can do with it but there's going to be a dedicated civity video all about that and I'll probably talk more about that during live streams and Rocket lasso live but really quickly just so you know you can always search for Rocket lasso inside the asset browser go to all and again you get the example files so even here you can see here's like that floor I was just talking about where I used two partitions we can even step through here here's just a plane and this first partition is going to subdivide it the second partition is going to subdivide it the other direction and then I'm using a node extrude thickness and that while thickness and then I can parametrically chamfer them and then I Ed a fracture to explode all the pieces apply this material and the material is automatically getting some random colors applied so I can say red shift render view let that render for a second and you'll see by using a fracture and a random color inside of a plane effector I'm able to colorize each of the planks separately and even offset all their UVS so even a very simple wooden material will be offset all over the place so yeah that should cover partition there's other examples you should go and check out when you get a chance but um let's transition actually before we go into Ivy there are a bunch of other things that have been added in into the Maxon drop this time and if we go under materials you're going to see that a bunch of new types of wood were added in there's some cork um so those might work well on top of the floor concept let's move on into a completely different tool let's move into our all category in the asset browser and search for the word IV pretty much everything you see here is relevant to the new IV tool but I want to give a couple of details right out of the gate first of all the IV generator was primarily programmed by someone named Ola kiner who works at Maxon during their Innovation week but once he had to move away from that project rocket Lassa was brought on to redesign the interface and add on a couple of additional features so he definitely did I'll Lion Share the work and I want to make sure he gets credit so in order to play with this I'm going to open up an example scene this is actually a scene I was using when we were designing all of the interface so I could test it in order to use it all you have to do is double click on the IV generator and it's going to create it in your scene this is node based capsules again if I zoom on down you'll see that we've got these sweeps generating the vine geometry and all these planes just to be an empty card for holding a leaf material but you don't even have to have it be a leaf material let's make this look nicer by double clicking on this English ivy up here and when you do in the scene file it's going to load in automatically a red shift Vine material for you to drop directly on the ivy generator and we've got all these different leaves and they have a bunch of you'll see over here if I zoom up on them you've actually got geometry on them so any geometry that you drop in as a child of the ivy generator it's going to swap out those cards for that geometry so you see we've got these leaves traveling all along it but keep in mind you can drop in any leaves that you make in there you could just make a material to drop in the cards you could drop some berries in there it's going to automatically select randomly from all these children and apply it all right so clicking the IV generator hopefully the interface is relatively straightforward as you take a look at it our primary settings are here things like our Max IV length so check this out if we start shrinking this down you can see that the leaves slowly grow in as it goes very fun we've got the overall density so this is how many additional branches get generated so you can make more and more and you can like really crank up the the different densities we've got Branch length we got length variation we've got the step size typically I wouldn't change that but you can make the whole thing bigger or smaller that way but in order to see anything cool why don't we have this star growing on something so to begin with let's just make a sphere and Scoot that sphere back in space and I'll say Okay IV generator I want you to link your surface object to any piece of geometry so in this case we'll grab a sphere and drop it in there and instantly the IV is growing on the sphere now now this is not designed to be super coherent but it actually is surprisingly coherent if I grab the sphere and start dragging the sphere away you can see that the IV has got a very good coherence to it which is pretty cool so that is of the basics of applying it here we can change lots of settings going over here we got things like climb force and the dangle Force so like right now there's a climb Force saying Hey try and go upward when you can if we set that to zero you can see that the vines aren't trying to go any particular direction you could even set climb Force to negative and now you see the vines are going to want to be going downward but instead of having to Tinker around with all these different settings there's actually a bunch of presets you can go to so we can click on this one's going to take a second to calculate because there's a ton you can see like lots of length lots of density but look at all these leaves and then You' even got a couple branches starting the dangle off the edge so of course you still have complete control over those you can set any of the presets and then change the settings after that so this can get you 90% of the way there and then you tweak it like here's climbing sparse so a similar layout but there'll be a lot less leaves so you can see we get all these Vines applied but very few leaves and other ones things like let's do dangling so dangling you see this one very strongly wants to just drop with gravity so let's drag this up and I'm just going to refresh a parameter here and you can see that it is now dangling down it's traveling along the surface and then instantly disconnecting from it and then dangling straight down so you can imagine tons and tons and tons of different looks that you can put together using this tool now if I let's unhide this geometry and so I'm going to say hey instead of of the IV growing on the sphere I'll move it down here into this corner right around there and let's say that don't look at the sphere instead look at the house so now it's still set to the dangle preset so let's go back to the default and now it's climbing up along the house so we can do things like increase our max length and it's going to be climbing up along the house there are some really cool things like this string selection this is going to allow you to say hey the ivy should only be looking at very specific parts of the geometry so in this case if I click on the house you'll see that I have a selection with all the walls so essentially everything except for the windows so in the IV generator let's delete out the word all and then drag in this tag you see wall has now been added in there so with wall being in there you see that the IV will grow but it will terminate if it ever strikes one of these window selections so again even more control over the way that this should be behaving on top of that there are a lot of additional settings we got things like how much it's actually attracted and clinging to the surface we've got a Target so we could say hey let's drop in here I've got this target you see I've got a null hanging over here in the corner of the building so inside of Ivy I could be like hey this is a target for you and you see that the ivy is attempting to grow in that direction clear that out we've also got a spline guide so here you see I've got this Ark spline traveling up along the house so I'll say hey I want you to travel along that Ark and now the IV is doing its best to grow along that and we've actually got separate settings for if you want the main Ivy stem to travel along it if you you make it really strong it's going to be kind of stuck it's you straight up stuck to the spine because the force is so strong but then the individual branches are still attracted to the walls and those will get stuck to there we could say the branches should be also attracted to that spline that we're feeding in so there are more and more settings everywhere like hopefully you see the power of this to be applied kind of anywhere you want to more settings underneath the geometry where we can do things like turn off the leaves and you know even under leaves you see tons of different settings for controlling the density and how often they're being generated and like the angle of the leaves the goal of course the settings being as artistically intuitive as possible moving under geometry you see we've got things like oh here's all the leaf settings how often they're being created the angles when they're clinging to the wall the angle when they are dangling down we've got the ability to say hey turn off all the leaves and now we've just got those Vines and then say hey I don't want to Output the geometry of the vines I want to output splines and now these are splines that you could maybe clone onto or I don't know maybe you could be animating these and generating some sort of lightning strike so a lot of raw power within this tool and at any given time keep in mind you always make a duplicate of it it's like okay well that's one bit of Ivy and I'll drag this over and make sure it's near the wall I'll click a parameter to trigger a refresh and you can see now I've got completely separate ivy with his own parameters growing on a different part of the wall so very exciting there's a lot of fun to check out there there's a bunch of also additional example scene files here so we can open up a new file double click here and you'll see we've got an example kind of of IV growing up along this wall sort of a fence look over here we've got a townhouse facade and just different complexities all over the place here's all those different presets where you're checking out so yeah there is a lot of different things to check out when it comes to IV and again there'll be a dedicated video for this in civity soon let's close that out and the last few capsules we can find them again by searching for the max1 drop or for you should be able to click the new capsules and see all the new stuff that was added in so of course we got all these new plants that were added if I right click on one of these plugs you can see there's an entire new collection let's say reveal an asset browser a new collection of European outlets and plugs inside of the electronics and Technology section and we already saw the new materials that were coming inside of it and you always great to have extra plants in there but that should wrap up the partition Ivy and capsules the next section is going to be all about simulations with the connectors and drag and lift beginning with the connectors here is the most basic scene I can put together got a couple collider objects and these three cubes selecting all three we'll say simulation tags rigid body if I were to hit play right now exactly we expect they'll all fall down to the ground and Collide independently so now let's go up to the simulate menu and then take a look at these connectors these might look familiar because we've had these since 2010 with Cinema 40 12.5 when it came to the bullet simulation system but now these have been integ gred with rigid bodies but with some additional functionality so we'll begin as simple as we can with a fixed connector I'll just move this down and what do I want to do well I want to connect a to B to start out with but you'll see we don't have the first object and the second object this time we have an objects list so let's drag in a and then drag in B and the instant I do you can see a connections been made between them not making any other changes if we had Play You'll now see that A and B are physic connected to each other effectively behaving as if they're one object there would be a little bit of play in them but you won't see that when there's only two objects so that's really interesting but things get even more interesting now if we rewind and now drag in object C so now we're connecting a to B to C and you can see that here via the create settings that's via the index so A to B to C bya play now we have three objects selected but we only needed one connector to do it so that's where some of the power of this comes in continuing to see additional functionality with this I'm going to change the type of connector to be an angular connector and inside there we have a mode with hinge and cardan but we want hinge hinge is like one of the most straightforward ones it's kind of like if you connected a wheel to the body of a car that's that type of spin so with this hinge we can what we want to do is offset it we want to move it to some other location so in this case if I rotate my camera a little bit I want to move them straight down hold down shift so I go down exactly 2 five because that's how big the cubes are 50 tall and not they're not rotated correctly so let's set R and I'll spin them to be 90 de so now they've been properly rotated so now we've said where we want them to Pivot and the direction they should pivot so let's hit play again and now you'll see that there's three different connections there on the bottom I think it might look a a little bit better if we move that to the top so hit e for move and move it to the very top of them and let's also say that the connector they shouldn't ignore each other so let's turn that off so now they directly Collide and that is where they pivot from hitting play you can see that those are going to hinge from exactly those locations so we're getting two hinges with only one object so a lot already you can probably see some of the power we'd be able to get from the system but there's a couple of specific things that might trip you up so I want to make sure to point those out let's rewind the first thing is when there's only two objects it behaves very differently than if there's three or more objects so let's delete out see and now you see that our hinge suddenly jumped to a new location when there's only two connections then you can manually move this hinge wherever you want it can pivot from any specific spot but as soon as you add in a third object it becomes relative to the relationship from the connector to those objects and I'll reiterate this later but it's kind of absolute in the world space right now this connector we don't want to move it to some weird location because you see as soon as I move it it's offsetting all those connections in a very absolute way and the same with rotating them it's it's absolute via the world so keep that in mind but this concept can get significantly more exciting if we do something like let's delete out these other cubes and now we've only got a and this time I'll even delete the connector this time let's feed a into a cloner set the cloner to linear and let's have it off set on Z so that they are stretching out that way and let's make multiple connections there now let's make that connection again now currently I have this cloner selected so when I create the let's say fix connector right now it's automatically let me select it it's automatically got the cloner fed in what's cool about feeding in a cloner is it's respecting it being a bunch of separate objects so scrolling down here you see it's set to index mode so it's connecting a to B to C all the way down the line let me move my rigid body tag up to the cloner because remember you always have to have your simulation tags on the top of the hierarchy and now if I hit play you'll see all of those will fall they're all connected you see that little bit of flexx I was talking about when you get those connections the only way to combat that would be to crank up your steps for the most part so you can see we got a whole bunch of connections there if I grab my cloner scoot it further back I can say hey make even more clones make more and more and more more copies scoot that back hit play and automatically it's updated and those have all gotten connected that would have been incredibly tedious to do in the past now let's do one more step let's do that hinge again so selecting my connector I'll say yes I want that to be angular and now we can move this around and it's the same setup so relative to each of them the halfway point between each object we can pull this down 25 hit R for rotate spin it around exactly 90 and now I've said that they all pivot from the bottom hit play and now we've got hinges connecting each one of those uh that's going to sneak through unless we set the floor make sure that my floor is respecting both sides so now when that falls each of those can pivot properly from these angles and they all hinge properly so yes being able to do that type of thing via a hierarchy or via a cloner is going to add a lot of functionality so let's jump into the next scene file here I've got very straightforward setup I've got a whole bunch of Cubes these are all 100 by 100 you see a little figure there for scale so if you want to follow along you can just make a corner with a bunch of these cubes there but I want to get a little bit trans here for myself here and I'm going to use Rocko's upcoming tool which is the voxal mesher I've mentioned this once before but I want to show it off again a little bit we're adding some really cool functionality in there so it hasn't quite shipped yet but what I'd like to do now is create a text object and let's make sure that that's going to Pivot from the center point and then I'll feed that into a volume Builder and I want the voxal size to be 100 so very large voxal now normally you'd feed that into a volume measure and create a mesh out of it but this time I'm going to feed it into our new plugin called voxal mesure so when I drop in voxal meser you see it's going to turn it into a bunch of Cubes instead now right now it's a hollow shell of Cubes which is pretty handy it's nice and fast where we can do things like grab the original text and spin around you always get the updated voxels from that but we've got a nice mode in here now that you can say convert to cloner and when I do that it's actually outputting from our voxal measure a whole bunch of just points in space so now this cloner got created it's cloning a cube of equal size to the voxel and it's just making a bunch of copies on there so it's going to run nice and quick I will change the cloner to be in instance mode because by default we set ours to multi- instance so it's super fast but you see I've got again a cloner but now I've got in a fancy shape so why don't we add a simulation rigid body on there and make sure that the ground has a collider as well so I'll say collider I'll say the ground is going to be a box I think it automatically finds that but let's just make sure that we are setting the shape so both these are colliding as boxes so of course right now these are individual boxes they're rigid body if I play the whole thing's just going to fall to the ground and collapse it's got no relationship to each other everything just falls apart so now let's make while we've got it selected to save ourselves a little bit at a time simulate connector fixed so let's just move that down so it's hanging out nearby and you see the voxel in there automatically and it's interconnecting all of them but default mode is indexed and I'm going to say no no I don't want index I want it to be based on the distance of the objects now important to note it's not calculating the distance from the center of the object it's actually from polygon face to polygon face so these are technically touching each other so we could connect these via like a distance of zero but now these are each getting connected to their neighbors important to note that you can do things like limit the number of connections I could say hey only each of these can only connect to one nearby object or only two nearby objects but I want to have unlimited connections within this range of 10 not changing anything else I should be able to hit play now and this entire thing will fall just like we saw before but all of these cubes have been connected to each other so it's going to be held together as one piece still got that Flex in there but you know I'm going to leave it as it is now I'd like to take a look at our breaking force and braking torque let's rewind all the way and activate braking Force currently the braking force is zero so it'll just break instantly now these numbers just like the old connector are very large you need big numbers to make this work so let's just step through and here's my typical process is I I don't know what number we need so I'm going to say 111 let me also collapse those because we don't need those quite yet so if I were to hit play right now and see them all fall yes they're just falling but with this force of 111 everything's just falling and collapsing in fact let's say don't ignore the collisions so now they won't pass through each other anymore so obviously that number is not big enough so let's try about a thousand hit play and they're all falling and immediately see those fly right P are continuing to break so that's not enough so let's do at this point like 11,000 so a really big number try it again and let's see what happens and this time okay our number is enough that that kind of stuck together and you see these breaking apart so this one we needed 11,000 until we kind of got to the range that this would operate the way we'd expect it to so just keep in mind that need to do very large numbers depending on the mass and scale of your objects so that is breaking force there's also breaking torque so let's activate breaking torque same thing I think these numbers don't need to be quite as large if I do 111 this is like if there's a twisting force on an object that I can break and you see that held together pretty well that one snapped right there from twisting so around 111 ends up being a pretty good number for that one now we can activate both of those so if either condition is met it's going to break so very fun that we can automatically get these breaking apart depending on how much force is applied to them we could do things like why don't we create a sphere and I'll make it bigger and scoot it on up into the air not too far and say that that will also be a rigid body I'll tell to calculate definitely as a sphere I'm can to say the mass I'm not sure what number to go to so I'll say 22 and now it's 22 times heavier than it looks for the simulation so now if I hit play Let's see what happens that's going to fall collapse and then as the sphere starts striking it it was able to break those top ones still not nearly heavy enough so I'm going to make it even heavier now let's see what happens with the additional weight start it over the sphere will fall and this time crash through and you see it just starts snapping these objects because that's so much heavier and they're able to break with that extra Force coming into the scene so that's pretty fun now there's even more power on top of that I don't need the sphere anymore I'll delete that there's even more power because we have the ability to add a lot of different weights throughout the system so here you can see I can twirl down ignore collisions and we could actually say what objects should ignore their Collision via a mograph selection then we've got break force and breaking torque and these also would accept mograph selection so we can say some things should break some things shouldn't break but then to me the more interesting one is under force and torque this actually wants a mograph weight map so we can weight different objects different amounts so we can say you know areas that are weaker or stronger so let's do that the interesting thing is you don't put the weight map on the cloner you actually put the weight map on the connector object so right clicking on there I will say I want a mograph weight map here we are able to paint in weights if we want but I would like to use the fields so I'll say Fields drop in a straightforward random field and yeah that's actually working really well I just want to increase the contrast so I will make a curve and select the points of the curve can I give it this S curve and I'll even say that they're more likely to be really strong than weak and grab the weak ones and pull them over so we got some dark ones and a lot of light ones so dropping that in the connector I'll say I want to both weaken the force and the torque areas they can break so remember anything that is yellow is pretty much 100% it's really strong but anything that is red via the selection is really weak so it's you know if that's 10% it's only 10% of the braking force is going to be required so with those new kind of randomized breaks if I hit play Let's see what sort of fracture we get this time and this time yeah you see it broke not symmetrically these are kind of breaking on these angles a little bit more a little bit easier to break now at any given point we could also key frame or manipulate those however we like so I could say hey let's remap that to be stronger so let's say that way more of them are going to break if I play we should see these start collapsing even further where there's barely anything holding them together now so you could even key frame that or modify it as the animation happens so you can get additional effects on top of it so that is another way that you can use this connector and do really powerful things an thing you can do is make this connector editable and you see the connector is kind of like a cloner but for connectors and now that I've made it editable you see all the individual connections that were made and you see their different weights have been translated directly into the value that's inside of the force so keep that in mind uh hitting undo we can go back to here but yeah I think that pretty much wraps up this demo always remember the differences between connecting index connecting distance limiting the connections it can automatically create connections or you can manually do it so every different connector is going to have its own behaviors but since this is the old connector system just sort of evolved keep in mind that you know all the old training will pretty much work on this new stuff except all this cool new Advanced connections let's move into another scene file for one last example of these connectors although it just kind of popped in my head I should mention that all this connector stuff works with bullet simulation as well so in this scene I will delete out all of of these connectors and I'll say make a bullet collider body and on this cloner it will no longer be a rigid body it will now be a bullet rigid body so the same connector is still there and it's still got the cloner so I'll just click create just to make sure it's refreshed but this is now bullet simulation and using the new Advanced connector if I hit play you'll see all of those connections are still being maintained so yeah this works with bullet as well okay into that new scene file I've got very basic setup we've got a cylinder here here's a figure for scale and all the default simulation settings so this time let's make a tentacle setup here like a really kind of organically controllable tentacle so my thought is let's throw this cylinder into a cloner set that to linear linearly cloning up into the air but this time I'll make a second cylinder and let's shrink one of them down I think this one I want to shrink that way down maybe even like 10 and now I can say cloner I want you to blend not iterate between those objects so if I were to make a couple more copies that we're going to be getting a blending of all those cylinder shapes so let's turn these into a simulation object so I'll say rigid body and before I forget I'm going to say that I want my Collision shape to be a triangle mesh that's going to work a little bit better here and you could say both but I think this is fine so if I to play right now we've got a bunch of individual objects if I play gravity's going to take over they're all going to fall so I don't actually want gravity to take over so control D go into your simulation settings and under scene say gravity equals zero so gravity is not taking over let's connect these I'm going to do that via simulate connector and let's do a spherical type connection I'll drag it down here so it's nearby and by default it's making a ball in socket but I would like it to be a ragd doll setup so you can see that we can limit the rotation this way but the angle's not quite what I want it to be so let's hit R for rotate and spin this to be vertical and and hit e for move and just scoot them down so they're pivoting more near the bottom cylinder rather than the upper cylinder excellent so those should all be interconnected now pretty straightforward so let's hit play and see if we see a difference well there's no gravity or anything so doesn't look like anything's happening so how about we create a simulate forces turbulence let's give it some scale and some power of 25 each hitting play now they move around and you see yes indeed they are connected but of course all thing's drifting around and moving away so let's make that a little bit more controllable so here's another cool thing you can do let's grab the bigger cylinder so that's this one I'll make a duplicate of it and move it down just below I want keep it visual I guess it can make it a little bit bigger too now let's copy our rigid body tag onto there so we've got another rigid body object but this time I'm going to say the rigid body on this connector it's going to have a lot of follow position and it's going to have a lot of follow rotation now currently the connectors don't work with a collider object they only work directly with the rigid bodies but by putting a really strong follow position and follow rotation essentially this object doesn't want to move anymore moving into our connector all I have to do is drag in this cylinder and let's make sure the cylinder is the very first object there because it's currently set to index so it's going from cylinder to First object second object third object so each one gets interconnected so now this bottom one doesn't want to move if I hit play now you see those are all interconnected and they can't move very far so now let's start art directing this a little bit I want these connectors to be a bit tighter so I'll drop my cone down to let's say 25 and let's just restart our simulation and you see those can only bend a little bit now so let's make a bunch more of those and I don't think the spacing needs to be quite as much so under the cloner let's only separate them by 40 and make a bunch more copies let's make a longer tentacle here now what's cool is if I go back to our connector it's automatically updated and that is thanks to our autocreate so now we've got a longer tentacle all I did was change one parameter automatically they all got connected and now look at that all right now our turbulance is a little bit small so let's crank the scale up to 100 and that should make them a little bit more uniform yeah look at look at that so now we've kind of got this tentacle automatically alive and look at how simple our hierarchy is to control that like very very simple we can control this though now with any of our simulation forces I can grab my turbulence make this way larger and you'll see just the the pattern of that noise feels bigger so that's something I usually do is make a very large turbulence and I'll make a second turbulence to make that one second one kind of small so you kind of get a tiny turbulence for variation but also a bigger one to make those big overall movements but keep in mind that this will combine with any direction or Force we can grab a wind force and let's you can see it's blowing backwards on Z so if I were to add a bunch of power onto that you see the wind is generally going to be saying okay blow it kind of backward so we can control it via that type of control so there's a lot of potential here so many different forces we can use and instead of manually making it let me let me pop open this kind of finalized file where I've got that same tentacle set up I just used another plane effector to colorize it and this time I made a sphere I made it a collider and then I fed it a spherical field and that spherical field goes into a field force and the field force is saying anything in this range should get attracted towards the center so with all of that in mind if I turn off that display box if I play now we've got the random tentacle but it's attracted to the sphere anywhere I move the sphere that tentacle is going to want to follow you see automatically it's chasing it around and it's a collision too so if I bop it around it's going to get moved around so that is really fun and let's push this a little bit further we could always make a duplicate of it now this is actually really important if you're building a hierarchy this is what I would usually do is I what's everything involved in the tentacle well I would make a null and let's say that the cylinder the connector and that cloner are all the objects that are used to make that so I dropped them all into this null and I would maybe take the null and move it to a new location even now you see it's pivoted from the wrong spot but maybe I make a duplicate and I'll make a second tentacle over here but there's going to be a problem if I go into my connector and especially if I hit this create to refresh it you're going to see that suddenly my connections are offset they're in the wrong location and that is at least for right now the connector is a relative position to the world so it's if if you offset it in this case let me pull it out you can see that I've actually moved it almost 900 units from the world zero not the not the relative zero so maybe that'll change in the future but for now you want to leave your connect outside of the hierarchy and leave it at position zero or only change the position relative to zero as you want it to relate to your object but now that I've done that I was able to copy and paste it I made sure that the connect was in the proper spot and if I play I do now still have two independent tentacles that move around and do whatever behaviors I want to do with very simple clean hierarchies now one last thing I want to do just because we're doing these cool rigs is what if we actually want to turn this into some sort of geometry well that's pretty straightforward too unfortunately the Tracer will not see the this cloner directly but if I make a matrix object and I'll say Okay Matrix I want you to clone onto an object the object will be the cloner that makes up that tentacle and I don't want to clone on to the surface I want to clone on to the axis of each object that Matrix is now cloning at the center point of each one of those now I can feed that Matrix into a tracer it automatically happens if it's selected so you see this Tracer is now viewing that Matrix instead of tracing the paths I would like to connect all objects and now you see this little line traveling through the entire thing I hit play that line will it will actually move with our animated tentacle so now I can take that and feed it into a sweep and put a nide inside of that t for scale shrink it down until it's kind of matching the bottom there give it a bunch more sides and using the sweep I'll just shrink the tip until it looks pretty accurate now hitting play you will see that our sweep will go anywhere that our animated tentacle is going to go and then even better I think I might need to modify my hierarchy if I yank this all out of the null if I grab my cylinder and I hit play as this is animating I am free to move this around and change where the tentacle goes from the base as well so very fun to be able to build relatively simple hierarchies and have a lot of artistic control exactly what we're getting out of them so that's going to wrap up the connectors let's move on to the drag and lift into this simple scene file I've got a plane set up as a newspaper and you see is real world scale compared to this figure so all we need to do is right click add a simulation cloth tag and the new settings that we care about are under forces and now we have drag and lift so let's just get some AB testing going I think so let's make a duplicate of our newspaper and we'll slide this one over so this one we're not going to modify and this one we will so right out of the box what are we going to see well let's add maximum lift and maximum drag you see the sliders only go up to 10% so I'm gonna Zoom way out here hit play and not really seeing too much of a difference between the two you can see that this one has begun to kind of parachute a little bit it's kind of bending in the center so it's doing something but not a lot so here's the important variable very important to keep in mind inside of your surface there is a setting called mass and the mass is just sending this absolutely to the mass of one the entire object doesn't matter how huge it is or how tiny it is it's sending it to a particular weight and that weight is distributed over the entire surface this is unlike when you're doing rigid bodies so if we had a cube and we add on a rigid body you'll see that our setting is density and density is based on the volume but that that's not the case when it comes to to these flat surfaces or cloth in general it's all just about how this mass of one is distributed amongst all the different particles that make up the simulation so this mass is it doesn't know how heavy it is it's all just kind of a relative value so it's like well is this a sheet of metal or is it a blanket or is a sheet of tissue paper like it could kind of be anything so we're going to go pretty extreme here so we can see the effects really nicely but what I have found is and we'll do this on both of them I'm going to change the mass to not uh 1% but 1,000th of the original amount so that's two zeros and then a one so 0.1 so now just having made that change those are very light so one of them still has zero and the other has the full 10% on them so just by changing the weight let me hit play and now you see a dramatic difference so essentially that weight is a giant multiplier on these so keep that in mind that makes a huge huge difference now what is the difference between drag and lift well drag is going to essentially counteract gravity it's going to be like well I'm traveling downward I want to slow down from that direction so it puts a counter Force heading the opposite direction so let's add in I'm going to go and put 100% drag so a huge huge difference and you'll see with drag only the whole thing is slowing down kind of parachuting out a little bit as it drifts down increase my frames here just kind of drifts downward does a little bit of a curl doesn't change too much and now it kind of started aiming downward it looks like it's accelerating now that yeah now it starts going really fast so as it is kind of behaving like a parachute when it can catch this counter Force when these polygons are perpendicular to the direction it's traveling it's giving a counter Force but when that finally rotated to such an angle it was cutting through the wind essentially in that alignment so keep in mind that's what the drag is doing let's get rid of that and do the other let's do 100% lift and hit play and you're going to get a very different effect you see it's gonna parachute a little bit but you see it very quickly rotated you'll actually see this a little bit better I'm GNA grab both of them and hit R for rotate and tilt them forward 10% like that so now if I play with lift you're going to see that that drifted you see how that drifted forward very quickly so while it's kind of this flat sheet it drifts forward and that's because this will travel essentially perpendicular to the orientation of the force so this wants to pull downward but this is a flat sheet so it's like oh I'm going to drift in the direction of my polygons and I think they get triangulated for those purposes so it's going to drift off in that direction now very quickly it starts twisting but if we were to apply let's say no bendiness then it's even less likely to bend and now it's going to travel forward for much longer because it's in you know it's parallel to the polygons it's perpendicular to the force so uh with those two things in mind we can start art directing these a little bit grabbing the one that that's actually being affected let's say that they're both back to being bendy and you know what I think we want to make them decently bendy so we'll Crank that up to 100% And I like pushing these values pretty far I think a little bit of drag just maybe like 10% to stop it from falling straight down but let's add in a lot of lift right now you see we've got 100% if I play play it's going to look pretty good where it starts drifting and twisting but there's still going to be a lot let me Zoom way out very tiny now but you're going to see there's going to be a still a lot of downward motion these are drifting and they start aligning hitting play now you'll see the original one falling really quickly this one's got the drag and the lift and you see we get some really nice twists through the air which I love that type of thing now if you remember the way the lift would work inside of bullet you would get tons and tons of those twists kind of wafting all around we can totally achieve that in cloth using the lift as well we just have to use higher values so in this case let's grab the lift and say 500% and I think we zoom up a little bit this time and now would play you see that this one is going to be a lot more likely to kind of waft and drift around so we're starting to use some fairly large values but it they're still very art directable and we can achieve the look that we're going for now I'm going to delete the original newspaper and we've just got the aerodynamic one I'll throw that into a cloner and let's make a bunch of copies we separate them a little bit and let's make this I don't know 7 by seven so we got a bunch of them now always remember to move your tag up to the cloner level and honestly I think that's all we need to do let's throw in a random affector just to get some random rotation going just a little bit so they're not all identical and then we can hit play we've got a whole pile of them it's still running reasonably well like I said my machine's you know I need the new machine but you see all these drifting down doing their own thing and with this bunch of lift going you can see that we get lots of drifting around now you can dramatically art direct these by again ranking up the power of the lift or putting more drag on there but also things like how bendy it's going to be how stretchy it is are going to have major impacts on it if we drop this bending this down to zero again these will all sort of turn into these flat planes that are drifting in one particular direction and they can only bend a tiny little bit so huge differences in Behavior just by changing bendiness so always remember those combinations and remember how important changing the mass is here changing the mass and changing the bending this I think are going to be the big variables as far as art directing this for them drifting around not falling straight down to the ground uh making this way bendier I think is what's going to give us those twisting effects so let's type in 100 on the bending this and immediately I think we'll see these we'll start it over again you can see these twist around and again I love that lify twisty parts of it and also it's not a bad idea to throw in something like a simulate Force turbulence a pretty good number here at real world scale something like 25 and a scale of 25 or even like a scale of 50 so now there's just a little bit of extra wind in there that's going to make different Corners peel up catch the air flip back up spin around and you see yeah look at these drifting around doing lots of different nice movements so yeah having the aerodynamics now implemented directly into cloth is very exciting that we've got that feature ported over now this was all very low poly we can actually push the effect though on something that's very high poly if you saw my NAB presentation from a year ago when they added in all of the really exciting pins on the cloth I've made this origami bird so taking this origami bird and again this is really tiny let's make the figure you see tiny little piece of paper right click on the origami bird all these different polygons already folded up let's say hey your cloth let's say you're very bendy let's say the paper is not too thick so like 0. 2 drop the mass again way down 0 01 and then move into our forces and honestly I just want those same settings again let's say 500 10% so with that hit play and you see the bird is handling it just fine all this paper really on top of themselves all kind of twisted up already folded you see the whole thing just wrinkling falling down as a pile it would start unwrapping itself a little bit adding a lot of bendiness on here is kind of letting it curl into this ball now if I lower the bending this it's going to probably try and return a little bit to that bird shape because that was its natural starting point we you see that we get a little bit more of this sheet of paper all just kind of crumpled up so yeah the lift and the the drag working perfectly well on a higher poly object but also keep in mind that this is relevant on Rigid bodies as well if we make a cube I'm going to make it sort of a flat flat block here let's add a simulation rigid body and let's add in that rotation again so 10% rotated make a duplicate and one of them I will add and this is default value so let's add on some Li and some drag on one of them but not the other hit play and you can see this actually has a a much more of a dramatic effect because when it comes to rigid bodies they don't work from Mass you see that they work from density so it's actually calculating the volume so I think that the numbers are actually a little bit uh more natural when it comes to density so hitting play you can see that this one is actually slowing down and it's going to begin drifting forward because based on its angle and we could start exaggerating those obviously go to forces and okay let's do 100 lift and zero drag and now you can see this one start to fall it's going to start traveling parallel to the polygon so it starts drifting forward in this case so the aerodynamics are also applicable to rigid bodies keep in mind that pretty much everything you know about the aerodynamics from the bullet system carries over so we're not going to spend a ton of time on those so anyway I think oh wait actually there is one Last Detail I want to mention when it comes to the simulation system here and that is the caching has changed before all the caching took place internal to the file let's actually go over here save this and I will open up that same file inside of 24.3 so I'll open up this one so there's the same one now in the older version of Cinema if you go to cach you see we have a very simple cach scene here we just calculate the cash calculate the scene it's all right here that's all internal but if we go to the brand new version and I click on this tab and I go to Cache you see it's very different we can save internally but we can also save externally we have the ability once it's been cached of remapping the animation just like olymic we can change the playback speed and control it directly via this offset we can do some time remapping so all that's really exciting actually it'd be great to do a demo of that during my live stream so hopefully we can Tinker around with that a little bit but I don't have a specific demo set up so yeah caching completely different in the new version but that should wrap this up and we're finally ready for all new particle a brand new particle system here inside of Cinema 4D now if you happen to be one of those people who jumped right to the particle section I just wanted to quickly shout out that right now from the point that this video has come out all the way through NAB rocket lasso has a 25% sale on all of our tools you can grab a link in the description use code NAB 2024 to get 25% off any of our stuff and also if you're watching this the day of launch I'm going to be doing a live stream talking about the new features so be sure to tune in for that now there is a a lot to cover when it comes to particles we could probably do another three hours just talking about it and I have no idea how long it's actually going to be but we've got a bunch of different objects to talk about and they combine in infinite new ways so my goal is not to go crazy on any one specific rig it's more to give a nice hopefully semi brief overview of what every one of these does on a on a slightly technical level so you understand fundamentally how the particles are behaving and therefore you can kind of make anything you want in if future we'll be able to go and make all sorts of kind of crazy rigs during live streams future videos maybe during presentations of mine so keep an eye out for lots of cool content in the future but for now we are just going to step through them individually the first thing that we should do is make ourselves a custom layout because we're going to be clicking a lot of these buttons really often so here's what I suggest you do and I I do suggest you do this as well I'm going to go to my simulate and tear off every one of these menus and kind of drag them in order so I remember what I want them to be so we'll grab our conditions and we'll grab our modifiers and I suggest that you also grab the forces and tear that off and personally I'm going to grab a couple mograph objects so I put that down here last now to place these I'm going to rightclick say customize pallets and now we're able to move all of those buttons to some new location you can put these anywhere that you want but for me person I want to nicely arrange them just down along my viewport now the longest of these menus is these conditions so I'm going to save myself some time and steal that entire menu drag it over and put it right next to my viewport and now it's been docked from here you can go into your different Collections and drag each one in one at a time try and keep it the same order just so you know if you ever do drop into these menus you'll have an intuition for the proper order now I do suggest grabbing little separator groups so we can grab group group separator and put a little Gap in between the different sections just so they are distinguished and drag every single one of these in very nicely I'm going to put another group separator keep in mind you just drag those over and yeah place the emitters above grab all these modifiers and I would put those below and finally I would also take maybe the Matrix object and I'm going to take the Tracer object and I'd again put a separator between there but I'm not going to make you watch me set all those up but when you are ready you can close down all these empty menus that you didn't use they'll all be lined up you go to window customize layouts actually we don't have to go to layouts you can go to save layout as and I saved mine as particles there's no particles layout so I made my own I'll hit cancel because I already made mine and here's what mine looks like so pretty much all those laid out exactly as I described so whenever we're working on particles I'm going to have this open because we'll be clicking these buttons really often okay right before we click to create our first emitter I just spent like 3 hours in between this clip and the previous clip you were watching trying to do tech support on the computer where my recording software is capturing things at kind of a stuttering frame rate where it's very smooth in my viewport but it's slow in the capturing software I've tried a bunch of different settings I've tried different recording softwares and I'm getting kind of same result it seems to be a little bit better but just know that when I'm seeing my viewport is better than what is being captured so apologies for that again waiting for that new computer keeping things simple let's create a basic emitter hitting play you're going to see it's creating particles exactly the type of thing you are used to seeing inside of the simulate Legacy particles emitter you see it's even got a very similar icon but there's one thing that is very different from the old one and the new one and you see that when the new one got created it made a particle group so what's happening now is an emitter has all the properties to initialize a particle but the actual particle lives inside of the group so if we want to do things like trace the particle or clone onto the particle or run simulation stuff and put conditions and modifiers all of that happens to the particle group not the emitter multiple emitters can feed into a single particle group so this is one of the core functions of the new particle system now my goal is to step through all the properties that are relevant and there's quite a few of them so let's just start going through keeping things simple we've got the basic emitter shape it's a rectangle by default we've also got a circle just like the old one but now we also have a cube and the cube one you'll see is actually emitting particles from all six sides essentially from the midpoint To Each corner kind of the pyramid shape going out in each normal and then we also have a sphere in which the particles will flow in every single Direction next up is our size which is a vector so if we want to squish it down in the vertical axis I could drop that down to 10 and you see we kind of get this pancake shape and even particles are going to be emitting from this flatter kind of a origin let's reset that back to default and even set that to Circle as we continue the next setting is enable we can turn off the particles from emitting and we can reactivate them starting them or stopping them at any time and then we've got a start frame pretty straightforward we say hey don't start until frame 30 so nothing and then they start at frame 30 back to default the next setting is very important and something I'm using constantly and these are different emission modes for right now you see that we've got a constant emission so I could say hey I want to emit 10,000 particles over 1 second so let's start that over again you see we get 10,000 particles per second alternatively we can say well give me 100 particles per frame so now that's like 30 times as many particles as per second because of course 30 frames per second and then the last setting specifically for the constant emission mode would be range if we activate that then we have a duration so essentially a start time and then end time that we can trigger these so that's a single pulse without us needing to do any key frames anywhere moving on the next mode is called shot so if we activate shot it's going to in this case at the start frame of zero do a single shot of exactly let's say 10,000 particles hit play those particles come out in a single burst and travel forward and I find myself using this mode very often where you just want to have a constant number of particles and then do some effects on top of it and our last mode is pulse and this is kind of a New Concept here in cinema and I really like this one so we're saying emit 100 particles over the duration of 15 frames and then put a space of 15 frames in between so let's tweak that a little bit let's say I want a duration of five frames and then a gap of 25 so every 30 frames we've got this Loop going on so hitting play on that you can see we get burst of particles and then a gap and then a burst of particles and a gap we can modify this however we want so I can say well give me a duration of 25 frames and then a gap of five so we kind of get the opposite we get a bunch of particles and then a little Gap in between let's crank up our particle count to about a thousand and you see we got a lot more particles now in that big group and then we have this distribution so over that duration we can map how many of those particles are coming at the beginning or near the end I'll even increase that curve a little bit so saying very few particles at the beginning of the burst and a lot more near the end so now start that over again you see very few particles and then the density goes way up so our ability to remap and have very direct control over this pulse of particles is really really powerful so let's go back to our default of constant and we'll say over the second we don't need a range so now we're going to talk about continuous I'd like to set up a little demo showing the problem uh if we didn't have continuous now if you've used the older particle systems then you might be familiar with this in the fact that uh if you had a very fast moving object maybe like a rocket that was emitting smoke out of the back if the rocket moves really fast then you get these little individual puffs of smoke behind each instead of it being continuous so let's build a quick little demo I would like a helix and let's align our mitter via and align the spline to said spline I want it to be linear so controll D go to animation I'll set mine to linear so it's just going to be a straight constant line of Animation no ease in and ease out now key frame the position at zero at the time of zero and then increase my timeline to 200 go to the very end move my position to 100 and then key frame again so that should now be moving along the entire thing now what I'd like to do is say make the emitter way tinier so let's just say 11 by 11 by 11 and turn off continuous and then finally I'll go to properties and speed and I'll say a speed of zero we'll talk about those properties more in the future rewinding let's hit play and this is this is without continuous and now when I hit play you're going to see see let me increase the particle count so we can see it even more clearly so if I hit play you're going to see that we get these little individual puffs of the emitter being created if I say that that should align to the spline we might see it even more clearly as this travels along the line you see we get little individual ones so if that was like a smoke Trail we're leaving there's all these big gaps but this particle system built right into the essence built right through the core we can turn on continuous and now when I hit play you see it traveling around super smoothly and it's actually creating those particles in between each frame and it's even on by default so you don't even have to think about that but I want to explain exactly why it's important and there are some scenarios that you might want it to be strictly happening exactly on the frame next setting is just the seed we don't need to worry about that we can just change it and you'll get a different distribution of particles so let's reset actually I'll just delete everything to continue so back to a basic emitter and I'll set that to Circle so back to default hit play you see we got a bunch of particles and again so now we can move to the properties tab where things can start getting exciting our first setting is actually the group so we can feed this to any group we can make additional groups these groups will have different properties which we will be getting into but for now that's how it gets added and it has a button to automatically create a new particle group if you didn't already have one next up is Lifetime this is how long the particles are going to live by default often times in these types of particle scenarios zero means forever so this just means that they will live forever there is no limit on them so you see them continuing forever but now let's say a lifetime of 30 frames per second so now if I hit play then you'll see as soon as we have 30 the particles will begin dying but you might notice that a lot of these parameters here in the properties tab have a twirl down and that twirl down is going to expose additional properties additional settings that we can add that you probably don't need as often so these are these are exciting so now we can do things like add lifetime variation so I'm going to say well give me a lifetime variation of 20 keep in mind a lot of these variations are both positive and negative so this is now going to be anywhere from 30 minus 20 or 30 plus 20 so hitting play we should see a lot of variation in the age of these particles as they move across you see them dying at different times now I'll reset that back to default and let's put our lifetime back up to 100 or zero so Infinity next up is our speed setting so we can set that to anything we like we can have the particles be emitted very slow or back to default or you know as high as we want to go and of course we have a speed variation so I can put 50 so now this is 100 minus 50 and 100 plus 50 you see a whole bunch of variation in the speed twirling that back up we've got the direction now right now essentially they're emitting from a dis shape so we have a very direct normal so that is the direction from the normal but we got a bunch of different settings it can be based on the axis of the object if we troll this down we can see additional settings where we can be going out from a different axis so if we were to go back to say the spherical shape we can have all of those still emitting in One Direction but from the shape of a sphere so you know that's pretty great that we can modify those we've also got the ability to do this radially so they'll fly out in all directions let me switch that back to a circle so these are flying out actually as a flat dis in this case but if it's a circle they'd be flying out from all directions and let's change this to random so these will be actually emitting in every total random Direction you know anywhere from this origin but then traveling out in any random orientation next up we've got a Target so here you get a Target object that we can tell the particles to be directed at so keep it simple make a null and I'll offset the null to be up in this corner so now the emitter tell to Target that hit play and now all the particles are going to be aiming straight at that at their creation point so I can grab this and move it down and it's going to be constantly kind of retargeting that but any existing particle that got created they're still heading to where the target was when they were born so on top of that we've also got uh C and custom would just be us setting like typing in a number so we can type in one and that means up so hit play and you see those all move up so that's kind of relative to the object and that can be local or Global space and then let's go back to something like normal so they're going to be coming straight out from the dis shape next up we've got spread so we could say hey give this a spread of 90 degrees and in this case you're going to see especially if we grab our emission and shrink it down pretty small you see that you know 45 up and 45 down to make a total of of 90° so those are all flying in this kind of cone shape now and then we've got the next setting which is our spread fallof which I don't have a great um intuition for let's go to all four views if we run that you see right now it's totally random like a nice even distribution of those particles but if I change our spread falloff to be a little bit higher you're going to start seeing that we get a higher density near the center and if we keep on going further and further we're going to get fewer and fewer particles flying further out and a lot more near the center and if we go to 100% then they're all back in the center as if we have no spread so zero those back out again next up we have separate from our direction is ADD emitter velocity so that would mean that actually we can just go and activate it I'm going to drag this up so that means that whatever our emitter is doing it's going to add that velocity onto the particles so if I were to move forward those are going extra fast if I were to move backward it's kind of subtracting from them so it's now relative to the direction and movement of my actual emter the actual physical object excellent so uh that's add emitter velocity it actually has the option to be the linear and angular so if you were to manually spin that as well you could control those individually next up is alignment so alignment is what is the direction of the particle so at the time of it being born what is the direction of the particle going to be so in this case it's going to be the velocity direction essentially it's aiming forward based on the way it was emitted like it was fired from a gun and the bullet's pointing in the correct orientation ation but that's only at the moment it was born we can twirl this down you see we get some additional spread so it can kind of be randomized from there and we also have an up Vector which typically you just want to be you know there's XYZ so y positive so the up Vector is up so pretty straightforward honestly most of the time I don't even mess with the alignment a lot of particle systems you won't even need that also you have your angular velocity and this is how much is it spinning so here you can give it a straight up speed or you can give it some speed variation and then we can choose a direction via our spin Vector again this is not something we need to do very often but we will come back to that later when we actually visibly be seeing it because right now you won't see it on a regular particle and then we've got color and color is pretty fun let's go and change our setup here and actually be kind of fun to make a let just go back to a regular Circle and get our range back and you know what let's crank up our particle count but they don't need to live for that long so we'll give it a lifetime of about 100 frames cool so by now color you see by default it's a constant color if I play we're going to get a bunch of particles flying out so you know that's fine but what's fun is and you see there's an alpha applied as well but what's really fun is we have random and noise so if I set that to random it's now going to be a gradient and we have a random gradient of noise it can sample from so you see we're getting some of these lighter particles and some of these darker particles but we can set that gradient to anything we like so why don't we just go nuts click on this load preset button and I can grab the full full color range get this rainbow now as I generate the particles you can see I can get any color from them so you know that's pretty fun right out of the gate and then pushing that even further we can switch this to be noise based so that will create this noise tab here which if it's collapsed you can increase that and now we can use noise control so keep it really simple let's set that to like a pearlin noise and I think it's going to look kind of small from the start so I'm going to increase that to 2,000 and hit play and now you can see that we are constantly yeah I guess maybe a little bit smaller just so you can see it clearly hitting play we're going to see that we get a little bit of a rainbow going but it's going to be consistent you can see we've kind of got this red stripe here a green stripe there and this yellow right there and it's going to be constantly showing that also if you've played around a lot with noises you know that your typical noise kind of is a very gray it barely can get to White it can barely get to Black so you can increase the contrast but what I like doing in this type of scenario would be doubling or tripling my gradient so if you right click on the empty space in your gradient you can say double and then I will actually double it again and now if I hit play there's going to be a lot more colors getting mapped on there again it's not changing so if we view this from the front it's almost like this extruded candy where the colors are super consistent which is you know pretty cool by itself but now if I take the scale of this and make it much larger you're going to see that we're going to get almost a solid bit of color just a little bit of a gradient but if we now add some animation speed on top of that then now from the origin point that noise is animating and you see we kind of get this transitioning rainbow color passing through the whole thing we could set that speed way down like 0. five do different noise types you see we get these really cool patterns over time from the particles and you know this could be flying out in any direction if we set our emission back to let's say a sphere those will be flying out in all directions taking on the colors when they were born and you'll kind of get these little bursts in this radial fashion so a lot of fun just to be had in the basic emitter not even getting Fancy with any conditions yet so yeah love that and that is just playing around with color there'll be a lot more to say about color in the future but let's go back to constant for now and our final setting in our basic emitter is going to be the radius so uh something I want to show actually let me simplify a bit put this back to a circle emitter and hit actually I'm going to drop the countdown so we can distinguish these a little bit so if I hit play right now you can see that we're getting all these particles and there's a certain kind of just like there's a DOT right there we're you're going to see that there's a lot of different settings being changed there but let's jum to a particle group because if we change our radius you're actually not going to see it happen right here in the viewport we have to go to our particle group and in the particle group you're going to see that there is a size and that is how it's being represented in the viewport now this this isn't super important I I don't think people need to really think about this but there is a completely separate simulation engine that is now running with Cinema so it's kind of completely separate running separately from Cinema the viewport and all that so essentially that's taking taking all the math and then taking the result of the math and sending it back to Cinema 4D and putting in the viewport so there's kind of like this interpretation going back and forth so in this particular case it's like well what size do you want these to be so I'll say Okay I want them to be two so now you see all of them are two but that's not the size of the particle that's just what's being displayed in the view part so if you actually want to see the particle size you have to activate draw radius so if you activate this we're going to kind of get this little spline drawn around each one and that is actually representing the radius so now if we go back to our emitter if we hit play you can see we got the radius getting output and if we say Properties or radius I can say well okay I want it to be a radius of five and now you see they're much larger we go into our variation and do a variation of five and now they can be anywhere from zero up to 10 so the radius needs to be represented by turning on the draw radius but keep in mind that that is going to be significantly slower like in this case there's not that many particles so it's not running any slower as far as I can tell but that will slow you down and most of the time seeing the radius isn't terribly important so let's turn that off and I guess while we're here let's transition a little bit into talking about this particle group and we've got different ways of displaying our points right now by default it's a bunch of dots set on our size hitting play you can see we get the little dots but we can switch those over to be arrows and you see instantly all of them change and even the fact you see them all change you saw as I've been making the changes to the emitter that if I change the lifetime or the speed or the color only new particles take that on because they don't have that property yet but as we change this draw mode all of them change instantly and that's telling you that these are not an inherent property of the particles themselves it's just the way they're being represented in the viewport so these arrows can be useful as far as telling what direction it's flying and then we get these tick marks and it just gives you these little X's that are always facing the camera it just is a little bit bigger maybe a little bit nicer to see and you can increase your size on those as well we can do lines which is one I'm fond of they're not too obtuse but you can kind of get the orientation of them and then we've got handles and in this case we might they're a little bit smaller but if you zoom up you can actually get the axis of each one of them so if you're dealing with a spinning and the rotation of them that type of thing can be really important and again changing the size here could be valuable right now there's a lot of particles it looks like a mess we have our X Y and Z being represented so all of those are very nice and very powerful going back to dots let's talk about the override mode display and if I click on this then right now there's no override but I could say I want a constant override and now regardless of what the color of the particle is it's going to show them all as red so this could be a good way of isolating particles kind of problem solving but keep in mind that if I had rainbow particles coming out right now they wouldn't be showing as rainbow because I'm overriding them but they still would render as like rainbowy particles and then we also have the direction and so it could automatically be adopting the color kind of like via normals uh the the color of the direction of the particles are traveling so so that can also be useful for troubleshooting or getting additional information but typically I would leave that on none and if you want to change your particle color don't change in the particle group change it in your actual mitter color drop down that's where you want to change it because that's what's sort of real that's what will render all right excellent so that is some of the basics of the particle group and the basic particle emitter but there is a bunch more there's also the mesh emitter so let's delete everything in the scene and start with a mesh emitter I think we'll make a a Taurus shape let's make the dut hole a little bit bigger on that one and then you see I have it selected when I create a mesh emitter you'll see that in the main tab it automatically fed the selected geometry in to the emitter so it's ready to go just kind of like a cloner does when it comes to things like affectors so mesh emitter there's only a couple settings that are different on the mesh emitter so it's going to be actually pretty quick to talk through these now so if I hit play you can see that we're emitting particles from the ENT surface our modes are from the points or the surface or the volume of the entire object to show this off a little bit better let's crank up our particle count I'll go to properties and say I want a relatively short lifetime of 20 frames and now if IIT play you can see that we got a bunch of particles flying out but they only live for a little while let's slow them down as well we'll say 10 so you see these all drifting out from the surface now we can change this to be emitting only from the points of the object and now you can see we get these little streams of particles coming from every single point from the tor course instead of surface and we can do from the volume and now the entire interior volume is getting filled with particles if we were to hide that you can see that the volume is what is actually emitting the particles so all of those are very very useful and next up we've got the scatter and actually the volume you can see it's sampling via a voxal size you can increase or decrease your resolution of the voxel most of the time it probably wouldn't need to be too high or I didn't even notice it but this could also be coming from a grid on the inside so if we activated that yeah I think the internals actually this would be kind of cool I want to see what this does if I do a shot of particles I'm not sure if the grid respects the count or not but I want to do a shot and I want them to travel only for 30 frames if we hide the Taurus there is now a grid inside of there that's creating some particles yeah it is based on the count so yeah that's pretty interesting moving back to our emission actually I'd like these to have their speed again back to our emission tab that is volume and then we got our surface and both with points and surface you can see that we have this restriction setting and that restriction setting we can feed in a polygon selection or a point selection what's cool is a point selection will work on Surface which is essentially polygons and a polygon selection will work in points which is just points so in points mode a polygon selection will view all the points of the selection I think in surface mode if three points make up a triangle it'll count it as a selection so uh why don't we just do a limited selection just for a second so let's make a parametric I'll right click on the Taurus add a other tag and that will be a polygon selection tag I want this to be limited to a particular area so I'll make a spherical field you see right there is the tolerance which I think is probably pretty important and I'll scoot this off to one side so that should be selecting certain polygons so now inside of the emitter I'll say restrict to this polygon selection and let's go back yeah it's emitting from the surface so if I hit play and let's make way more particles hit play you now see that's emitting only from the section where the polygons were actually selected and actually it's a shot so let me say constant so now it's constantly emitting particles from those selected polygons and you can do the same with points moving on all the rest of these settings are identical they are the same settings we had before we could be doing a shot of particles we could be doing a pulse of particles sending stuff off from this emitter so that's pretty exciting but then we got one other really important section and that is we now have property maps so we got this new section where we can feed in vertex maps and color vertex maps and I got to say I love these little icons being here displaying exactly what type of tag we can feed in so that gives really good feedback yeah we could add in a custom map and modify what the lifetime is so why don't we do that we don't need the selection tag anymore instead we'll right click and add a other vertex map in the vertex map uh let's just use the same spherical field drop that in then you see we get this little fall off going on so now I'll say in our mesh emitter I want this vertex map to drop Drive the lifetime so keep in mind when it's yellow it's 100% when it's red it's 0% so it's the lifetime times zero so I think all the particles around here are going to live for a very short amount of time where the ones in the very center will get the full lifetime I think of 22 frames so let's hit play and see what we get and let's see oh it's a little bit subtle but we rotate around you can see yeah these These are disappearing really quickly and these are living for a while it'll be more extreme if we give our lifetime a little bit more time to be displayed start it over again and we get the particles drifting away and you can see the fall off actually the fall off is really important so let's crank up the fall off so you see we get the full range there hopefully hit play and you know what let's make the particles be twice as big so yeah now you can see the fall off from them and how long that they're getting to live so we can drag those Maps into any of these properties so that can be controlling the speed of the particles we can control the direction map and you see that wants a color vertex map so it's probably based on like normal colors we can control the alignment so the initial direction also based on a color map and the angular velocity and then we've got the color map that one's actually pretty fun why don't we make one of those right clicking I'll say I would like a another this time vertex color map and in here I'll feed in a random field the random field is cool when it comes to Colors because it generates all colors so it is a noise if we increase the scale eventually we'll get some coherence going on so there we go nice smooth coherence and let's even animate it so I'll do 0.5 animation so vertex color map inside of our mesh AIT driving the color hitting play we now see that the particles coming from there are taking on the color of the surface as it was at the moment it was born but that's an animated map which is going to be constantly updating so we're going to get different color particles as it goes why don't we make that actually animate even faster so we can oh I did 0. five so let's make it 100% and now we actually see those colors change and as they change our particles will change with them as they're born so man like already just from the emitters you can see how much power we have controlling different things here so very exciting so that is everything that we can do differently with the meshimer although there is one last thing I should mention delete that out we don't need those uh the last thing that is important is that this does only allow you to feed in a single object but you don't have to have a single object because you always use a connect object so if I make a connect object and drop in the Taurus let's make a copy of the Taurus and change it orientation scoot it over and now in the mesh Metter tell it to look at the connect and now if I play all those properties are going to be applied to both of those meshes so very very handy always love when the connect object is being used and honest honestly even when I'm only making a single mesh I often times will still put it in the connect object and feed it through because now I don't ever have to go into the emitter to update the object I could say you know what I don't want that Taurus I want a cube and I can drop that inside scale it over move it to any location and now when I refresh it's going to be automatically updated without me having to go into this property and replace it so yeah connect objects very powerful okay we're actually going to skip the reproduce but for now because that one's really important that's how we can add like child particles but for now let's jump to the spline emitter and this one is very much like the mesh emitter where we can create a spline of some sort why don't we make some text and let's feed it in manually right there so currently you see it's traveling along why don't we change the text to say 20 24.4 put that in the middle and I'll make a bold font so excellent now the spline emitter let's Crank It Up just so we can see them really clearly I'm going to go to properties which we're getting pretty familiar with tell to only live for 22 and be traveling a lot slower constant color hitting play you now see we got a bunch of particles emitting from the spline if we go back to our emission you see we have a couple different settings we can say don't travel from the entire surface of the spine only be on the points of the spine and now you can see kind of these straight edges there's almost no particles except on the corners where there's actually a point but these curved shapes there's a bunch of points that make it up so more emission you can restrict this via a Vertex map of all things and there's a restriction threshold uh there's no restriction when it comes to a um and right now actually it's random but we could do it via an interval so we could say well let's see I want it interval of 10 units and now you can see that we get spaces in between so already so many different effects that we can do just on top of the spline and lastly no matter what settings you have we have this thickness so we could say hey don't emit directly on the spline kind of act like that's a spline that got swept is like a pipe shape so we can offset by five and actually if we said this actually would demonstrate it clearly let's say it has a speed of zero so just go for a couple of frames and you can see that we've kind of got this hollow pipe shape around it which is pretty neat and then of course that has some variation so it can be really close to the line and further from the line and after that everything is the same as we just described in the mesimit under properties all the same settings and under property maps all of the same Maps because you can use parametric vertex maps and color vertex maps on these splines so why don't we do a quick color one on there so I'll say right click on the spline create a other vertex color map and let's feed in that random again so that's going to be randomly creating color and this size is probably pretty small so let's jump it up to about a thousand and tell that color map to be fed in right there it's play and now we can see that we're getting colors on the spine and we could animate that color field we could have some sort of fall off if we feed in a different shape so inside that color vertex map instead of random let's put in a spherical field move this up and we can choose any color that we like so let's go to our color remap right now it's just a solid color you say gradient and in the gradient let's load a preset and let's grab one of these funky new ones so we got this pink color so now as they admit you can see we get that color fall off from it change our particle group to show up a little bit better and yeah complete control over the colors of the particles or if you wanted to of course control over the lifetime velocity alignment angular velocity and the radius so much power and all we've done is looked at the three basic emitter types there's so much to talk about when it comes to particles so let's talk about making these particles renderable how do we interact with them inside of the scene we'll start completely from scratch we'll start with another basic emitter this time I'd like it to be based on a circle so we can make a shock wave let's do a shot of 10,000 particles and from the 10,000 particles I would like to let's see let's do a velocity based on a radial and now if I a play we should get a burst of particles at the time of zero going out in all directions excellent so how do we start making these real in some way well like I said the points live inside of the particle group they've now got a bunch of attributes they've got a radius they've got a color Now by default interestingly if you start rendering in red shift those particles are going to render I think out of the gate hopefully my recording can handle this let it prepare send and now you see that even with nothing on there those particles will render so keep that in mind I will say that tripped me up a couple times where I didn't want those to render in this way but if you actually want to get more control over the way those look what you should do is right click and add a render tag and add a red shift render tag and you see that we have a particles tab you can access and inside of there you can do things like Point instances and sphere instances and custom objects so you can change this to work however you want and once you've done that then you can do things like addon materials onto it so I'm not too interested in the rendering right now though so let's get rid of that but keep in mind if you want that to be controllable the particles live in the group and put a red shift tag directly on that group so deleting that uh actually you know what while we're there let's do one little thing which is why don't we make sure that you know how to apply the colors to them so if we go inside of our material a new red shift material double click and just search for user and inside of your user color data you can get a preset and one of them is particles you say particle color or particle color with Alpha so now if I drop that on there we've got the red shift particle ready to render and let's go back to our basic emitter tell it to be random and let's do the full rainbow because why not tell those to actually and why don't we have some variation on the radius so we can see that as well so let say a radius of two with a variance of two so anywhere from zero to four so now as those admit we get this giant burst of particles different radiuses apply the material and let's make sure our particles are set to actually render something so let's just say we'll do a sphere instances that should work so now open up red shift and give that a moment to initialize and now you see that those have all been essentially generated spheres they have the color they have the radius so that's one way of making them real and controlling the color via the particles next up let's turn these into lines and here's what I like is these particles there's not like all these crazy tools to to to essentially rebuild the wheel we don't have to rethink the wheel we already have a tracer object so with this particle group selected I will create a tracer object I'll say hey limit from end and let's just do like 22 frames now when I hit play we'll get burst of particles and I've got tracers tracing behind all of them living for exactly 22 frames that's how we get lines from it to the best of my knowledge there's no way of applying the color of the particle onto the individual lines but you know cross my fingers for that feature in the future so that is tracing them let's change this emitter back to something basic in fact why don't we just start from scratch I will say a basic emitter and I I like J get the circle because rectangle is just something we've had for so long and this time why don't we spin the entire thing downward and we start playing around a little bit so in this case I would like to yeah we're going to emit the particles let's have them only live for I don't know let's say 65 frames and they don't need any speed because we'll let gravity do their thing so if we hit play you'll see particles are being generated not going anywhere well I want those to become objects of some sort so how would we do that like we need geometry well you use a cloner couldn't be more straightforward with the we got the particle group so let's create a cloner and we'll tell the cloner to be looking for an object the object will be the particle group always remember it's the group that's actually real and what do we want well let's create a tiny Cube actually let's grab our uh platonic shapes and make them a radius actually I'm going to make them a radius of one because a radius one means we they'll take on the radius of the object so I'll just drop this in and I'll grab a couple of the different shapes so hexa and we can make a DOA so just a couple different shapes in there so the cloner cloning out to the particles I'm going to say take on the particles scale and let's go back to our emitter and say okay let's have their scale be 100 actually not maybe not that big we'll say 50 with a variation of 25 so now I hit play and you'll see that we're going to get a whole bunch of different shapes and they're taking on the exact size that the particle told them to be but let's make it more interesting let's go into the emitter and say that they have a random color based on whatever we want so let's grab this brighter gradient this time hit play and you'll see that the Clones are automatically taking on the color they're a little bit big right now so I'm going to drop this way down we'll say 10 variation of five and now let's push it even a little bit further yeah now look at all those cool sh shapes being made so we do something like right now they're all being created at the same rotation so we'll go back into properties and we don't need a velocity but I do want some alignment so let's say that it is random so now as each shape is created it's going to be at a random Angle now let's right click on our cloner and add a simulation rigid body so those are now going to be creating rigid bodies not even applying any gravity or anything to scene it's all just the default settings hit play and now those are going to be created and start falling to the ground now there's something really important I want to mention so let's create a floor drop it below scale that up a bit right click simulation collider and I'll say collide with both sides so here's what I want to talk about inside of the basic emitter we can say that there's a limited lifetime in this case 65 frames if you've ever tried to play around with particle stuff in the past with a cloner there's a huge problem because as a particle would die uh on the old emitter as a particle would die all the indexes would change so the cloner the first clone is trying to clone on the first particle but that first particle died everything Jitters all over the place when it comes to the new particles they always remember their absolute index so that means if particle one dies then okay the first object dies but all the other ones don't get shuffled around so what that means is I can hit play we get all these objects falling and colliding on the ground and as the individual ones age out they should disappear yeah you see a bunch of them start starting to disappear but the shapes aren't all popping around they're consistent they're coherent so we have complete control over these so that's going to go a really long way for us being able to create like really cool powerful animations that in the past we just couldn't essentially think of how often you've had a bunch of particles flying off the screen and they're eating up a lot of calculation time but you couldn't let them get deleted because a cloner would start popping the indexes around so now automatically works so now you've seen how we can render the particles directly we can trace them we can clone directly onto them honestly there's probably even more ways to render them that I'm not currently thinking of but that is a way of making your particles actually real in the scene and being able to Tinker around with them let's reset that continuing to try and keep things simple same scene just delete everything out from here let's just talk about how the different forces work and they pretty much work exactly as you would expect them to we can make any emitter so we'll make a basic emitter let's make it a spar this time and again I like doing this burst of 10,000 particles at some I should maybe make a preset here where I can say hey default preset to do these different shapes that I really like we'll do a shot of 10,000 particles and hey why not let's make some crazy random colors oh we'll do flame six this time so we do a burst of particles and they're all kind of flying around let's get rid of them flying around so properties lifetime yes but velocity zero so particles get created now we've got a whole bunch of different forces all the forces we're used to now some of these I almost never used we got things like the attractor I tend not to like the attractor the attractor has like a built-in fall off if it gets closer to the center it gets stronger if it gets further away it gets weaker so I always use a spear and a field Force but we'll get there the ones I use most often are going to be turbulence wind gravity and probably friction but all of these work even the destructor I think and even the attractor so let's start out with the turbulence make a turbulence by default the default settings very weak and no scale so if we hit play on that these are going to get created and all of them are going to start drifting around because we have a scale of zero it's kind of infinitely random so they just kind of randomly Drift But if we change the scale to be something larger a little bit more coherent like 50 you can see that this will drift around sort of like a cloud and look at all the different particle colors like really cool out of the gate and of course you can change the strength and the scale to make these different the animation speed and we don't need to go through all of them because they all behave exactly as they traditionally have we can make a wind let's set that to 55 and now it can blow all the particles in a particular direction and then we've got friction which right now is not going to we we'll say friction until we actually have a circumstance to you see it but if you want gravity to affect particles then we just make a gravity and now those particles will start at zero but gravity will take over and they all start to plumet straight down so yeah forces working exactly as you expect you can get fancy with Field Force and I still I feel like most people don't play with Field Force enough probably because they don't play with Fields enough and it's so powerful you can do so so many different things and I'm sure we'll have a couple examples using this but we can do a very basic one let's just make a field Force keep in mind you got three different modes add to the velocity which is the way things like turbulence work set an absolute velocity to just be like okay that's the speed and direction you're going just go and then change direction which means don't change the speed but hey you got new orientation and using field forces you can drop in any field and they all have crazy different properties and will create brand new behaviors for you so you can do something simple like just create a a solid and a solid is essentially a vector direction that just says hey everything in range which is infinity go up and right now it's a strength of five so if I hit play you see everything is very very weakly going to go up I tend to find the strength here needs to be a little bit stronger for them to uh really travel but yeah all those can travel up or we can delete that and make something a little fancier like a random field and this random field as we make this larger you're going to start seeing a little bit of coherence there so now we hit play and it's going to be akin to the turbulence but there's a little bit more visual control over this you'll see more of this later see these drifting around and you get all the controls of noise like the speed and the scale and the way they rotate around we'll be getting fancier with that in a little bit so yeah forces just applied the particles and it's great and right now this is going to become very important for the next section you see my field force is just hanging out in the rest of the hierarchy just doing its thing so now it's time to get into the meat of what makes this particle system really exciting and that is the idea of conditions conditions mean we are going to limit an effect via some trigger some condition needs to be met so it's kind of like this if than situation in kind of programming terms or just saying like hey if this condition is met I want something to happen so in this case even a particle group is a condition it's a condition saying like I'm in this particle and we're going to be using that concept A lot so right now we've got this cool burst of purple partic but let's make a different emitter so just to be different why don't we make a spline emitter and the spline emitter will view I always want to do a text blind because that makes it super unique so let's make a text blind we'll say 0 4 go to middle and I'll just offset that in Space over here okay cool so spline emitter please look at the spline object and again uh let's just do a shot of particles 10,000 of them and the color will be random and the gradient this time will be let's do that one okay cool so hitting play we now have two let's get the speed out of there so zero speed so now we have two different particle systems and you see these two particle systems are feeding into two different groups we got group one and we got group two so we should probably name these so I'll just copy Splinter and rename that there and basic emitter basic emitter so I just know which one is which it doesn't actually change any functionality so let's let's say I want turbulence to affect both of them I can create a new turbulence and again let's give it a decent scale make it Little Bit Stronger I play right now it's just all both of those are going to be effect at the same time in the exact same way but check this out I love the way this works instead of some sort of complex in exclude list or something like that all I have to do is say you want I want the turbulence to only apply to that burst of purple particles all I have to do is drop this as a child of the basic group this will be spline group so now with turbulence as a child it's now in a condition a condition of is it in that group so now when I head play you see the text isn't affected at all but this one was and then let's say I want a different turbulence applied to that one so I'll duplicate this turbulence into the spline group this time say okay it's a really tiny one that's really weak so very random this one's coherent that one will be random so now when to hit play that one gets a little Randomness and this gets the big flowy one it's that simple you just drop it as a child of a particular group and it's applied only there oh man I I super apologize that the frame rate so all over the place in my viewport it's looking really nice and in my recording it's kind of choppy so apologies so that is applying the condition to these different setups but you can start going so much further than that right now that's just the group we could do things like well let's create a friction and I leave the friction outside of the groups and we can crank that up even higher so it's constantly draining energy out so it's draining energy out from both of of them so they don't ever get too crazy you see it's not flying out of control this friction is applying to both of them I could say you know what I want that crazy friction only to apply to the number four so I drop it after the turbulence and now that one gets all crazy and this one is free to drift but I can make a duplicate of it and this time say hey you're really strong in the friction so it can go only super slowly so you can see how easy it is to starts stacking those now something important to note is the order of operations does matter especially as we get a little bit more complex here that the different effects they will change if you rearrange their order now something like turbulence and friction not terribly different but as we continue keep that in mind there's something called multi-group so if I were to select spline group and basic group and create a multi-group it's actually going to feed those in automatically all the ones you have selected so now we've got a group that can feed properties to both things at the same time so if we had four different groups I don't need to make like two different turbulences for different objects I could say no combine those two and apply the turbulence to both at the same time so we can just keep on stacking up these group Concepts and have very direct control over different objects and all of it happens right here in the object manager and I think that's one of my favorite things about the new particle system that we don't have all these in excludes or link lists where we have to go into the object and see what's connected you just see it right here in the viewport I dig that now let's get things going a little bit more exciting by introducing some additional conditions like I said the group itself is a condition but now let's make a new condition right here so making a condition what is this condition going to be well let's say let's make that turbulence I really like the way that that is applying overall so I'll just drag this down it's applying everywhere make it little more powerful and again give it some scale hit play you see both of those being affected completely right from the beginning well let's make this condition oh look at the condition inside we've got different properties these are the different properties of the particles these are properties of a group and and we can say something like oh we've got the age of the particle so if the age of the particle is the condition what do we want to have happen so the condition is the age so we can say right now if the age equals zero so only at frame zero I can say if the age is greater than or equal to so once these particles have become 30 frames old or older do what well it's condition so I'm going to say when your condition is met execute on the turbulence the condition was met so I hit play 30 frames of nothing and then suddenly they activate the condition was met so we can now create conditions based off of any of these properties and not only off of any of these properties but any of those properties as combined with this comparison so equals greater than less than less than or equals not equals like inside a particular range so like an upper and a lower uh or outside of said range so just those are going to open up so many crazy possibilities so I want to keep on keeping things nice and simple you see that this range we could say inside of a range so we say if the age is that the lower range will be 30 and I'll say the upper range will be 60 so now can only have this turbulence applied for those 30 frames on top of that let's create a nice heavy friction and we'll Crank That way up to a th so friction is constantly trying to be applied and but the turbulence is only applied a little bit of the time so we have play from the beginning and you see nothing moves and then suddenly we're going to get 30 frames of them drifting around and then it turns back off again and the friction is going to kick in constantly and drain out the power so those all move to new position maybe the friction is a little high in this particular instance so we can see those drift around and then freeze up again thanks to the friction with a very simple condition now that condition because it's outside of any particular group it's just applying everywhere but we can apply it to a specific group so say we want the purple blob again to be affected so I'll drop that condition inside of the basic group so now if it's in the basic group and the condition of the age is met because it's inside the range of frame 30 to frame 60 execute on anything that's a child of that condition so now we going to hit play only that one is going to execute and you see it starts drifting around now an important thing to note do you see how the colors were changing there a little bit that threw me off in the beginning essentially the color it what it's going to do is gray out when you have a condition selected it Grays out everything that is not part of that group so it's kind of the opposite of what you think so if the color changes those are particles that have nothing happening to them so essentially when these particles turn bright that means their condition is true they're getting their original color not faded out that means it's getting applied all those conditions were met and now they're not met anymore so keep that in mind that might be a little inverse of what you're thinking maybe that'll change in the future I'm not sure but two conditions met and now hopefully you start seeing a little bit of the power here inside of the conditions there are a bunch of them we can have conditions on the alignment on the velocity on the color on the distance it's travel total if it's in a particular group or not uh what the total lifetime of the object is the position radius like look at all these age percentage and velocity speed I use both of those really often so just yeah the mind starts getting boggled by the sheer amount of possibilities as you start thinking about these conditions but we don't just have one condition we have more so let's pull that out and delete that one you'll see we also have a field condition a field condition is usually just a space it's like using any of the fields and that's essentially what it means obviously is if it's within the condition of the field so in this case I could say okay if it falls within the spherical field so you know for me I'm going to get this inner offset so it's pretty much full power all the way through and I'll scoot this over here so it's actually catching a little bit of our blob and a little bit of the four so if it's inside of that range then the condition is met and the turbulence should execute so hitting play you'll see that only the particles in that range are getting it applied crazy and that is a field condition on top of the other conditions so we could say well once it's a certain age and in the spherical field do something and the last major condition I know we're kind of glossing over like the billion possibilities in each of the but the last condition is going to be our time condition and this one's really important so the time condition means you can just say hey once the scene time has done something so if the scene is greater than or less than or equals execute on something but this condition what I've started doing is thinking of it a lot like the plane affector where if you remember in the early mograph days there was no plane effector but often times you wanted something to apply to everything so if you want a condition to be met at a particular time that you can then turn off using a Time condition can work really well so you also have the option to get all the pulse settings so you can have a start frame a duration so you can get a looping condition that happens again and again and again and of course that is these conditions can get applied on top of each other so only if all conditions are met now I don't want to get too crazy right there it's just shown a lot of the possibilities and as we continue it's going to turn a lot more into not you know clicking on every single setting like for the most part you just just have to understand that when you make a condition like we don't have time and it's impractical to explain what all these individual things are but you know distance traversed that seems pretty intuitive once a particle is traveled a particular distance it can do something so you just keep that in mind and when you're trying to create cool crazy complex things you're going to be able to reapply that and you know make any Vision that you can uh have pop in your head so it would be impractical to go through all these conditions like the field condition and the time condition and all these different properties and spend a half hour talking about these specifics of distance traversed like yeah there's going to be unique properties with that and unique ways of thinking about it and thinking about how far the individual particles have traveled to trigger some new condition but a lot of these are just building blocks that you Tinker around have the tools in your head and now you'd be able to make any rig that you can think of so we've got these forces here but now we've got these new modifiers all these modifiers will change the will change some property of the particles so what well essentially we should just start stepping through here so the very first one is the color mapper it is probably one of the most basic of them so let's just create this and I'm going to leave it outside of all the groups and what this is is essentially a range mapper for color what you're going to do is say well take some property of the particles and then map it onto some colors right now it's on a property which just means it's a gradient we can map something onto this gradient of colors and right now I've got this outside of all of the group so it's going to apply everywhere in this case let's say when the age is from zero to I don't know let's say 90 it's going to map onto 0er to 90 over its age and you see it's applying to everything because it's outside of every group hitting play you see that our colors were overridden entirely because we've got a condition applying everywhere if we let these start aging you see it's now transitioning through all of those colors until we reach 90 and it'll just stay at the final color it's like oh my goodness like the power of these gets so crazy now you could do things like repeat so if we activate repeat I do believe that when it reaches the end of the blue it's going to jump back to red and then repeat the entire thing again so that will go on forever it can actually be applying only to the alpha immediately it's like okay that's really cool but then we can do things like well I want this to be based on the distance traveled so in this case let's make another turbulence so that these actually have a little bit of travel and we'll apply it only to the basic group so in this case again give it some scale and not too much strength actually we'll leave it at five so I hit play and those will start traveling around but actually let's go to the color mapper you can see that's a distance traveled now from 0o to 90 which I actually coincidentally I think is going to be a good value hitting play you see as these travel they changed to new colors the ones that move faster their color changed faster actually let's turn off repeats because I don't want them looping this time so we'll let these keep on traveling and they're going to transition to Blue and they'll stay blue forever just based on how far they travel so look at all these different properties that we could apply this to and you can remap the colors now you can also map the age to not the particular gradient of this property but you can do it to a field so now we could say the color is going to be mapped onto say a spherical field so we make a spherical field drag it over and this is just going to apply the color of the field itself directly so we go to the color map set it to be a gradient even yeah right here it's a black to white gradient so now if I hit play you can see that the gradient is getting applied straight up through the fields and lastly we have noise so we can apply Color just via a noise in the world as it travels around so in this case we've got that gradient again if we have play we've got a kind of world noise probably I would take that and let's make a different color let's go back to the big old rainbow gradient so now as they start traveling around the noise you can see that they're going to change as they pass through the clouded noise they don't inherently have one color forever it will move around with that noise oh let's make them bigger again so grab the group and increase the particle size so we can see them a little more clearly so yeah those are now change color as they pass through you if you look at a one particle which might be a little bit tough but you can see the color changing so yeah very cool so color mapper very powerful the the way of controlling color on objects deleting that next up we have the data mapper or data mapper I I use both terms so what does that do well it enables us to map any bit of data to any other bit of data all the information about the particles so again let's create one and drag it down and what do we want that to do now well we can map the age so why don't we do that we'll take the age from 0 to 90 and then we can control some other property you see we get some different properties here we could potentially change the color if we wanted to but in this case you have to control it via a vector so if I set well actually we have to do R and G and B individually but we could change the internal value of the distance traveled we can make the lifetime increase we could change the position we can change our velocity speed that one might be good actually let's change our velocity speed so when the age is zero we'll say the velocity is only one but then as the age gets up to 90 we'll increase the speed up to 55 so now let's rewind hit play and you'll see these drifting around very slowly but the suddenly they get really fast and that's because we've remapped the age but you'll see by default there's actually the spline so it's going to ramp in and then ramp back out again so in this case it took the age sped up and then slowed down but we could change the spline to anything we like we do linear and now it's going to just ramp up to be fast and then the last value will just stay there forever so those will just keep on drifting around at exactly the speed of 55 forever so man think of how much stuff you're going to be able to do with just the the data mapper like how much we can change any of these properties are going to immediately remap onto any of those like it's crazy but then you can also do things with a field so now we can map onto the velocity speed so we can like change the Age based on if it drifted into a particular field if it went into a particular cloud of random noise you can change the velocity of that you can change the color based on if it drifted in we can change the radius depending on if it's drifted in or out of a field and that's just using a data mapper not even using any sort of condition keep in mind you could drop the data mapper into a condition so it would only be executing when the condition was met and of course you can also map it directly in the noise so you big old cloud of noise mapping onto any of those same values so yeah we will be building a couple rigs as we get to the end of this video so we'll definitely be using some uh data mapper next up is kind of tied for one of my favorite things inside of particles and that is the very clean and simple math node let me show you how powerful this can be let's start from scratch actually so let's delete everything and I will create a basic emitter and this is actually a setup I highly recommends people do like as you're playing around testing your particles treat things two-dimensionally when you can so you see I've made a 1,00 by 1,000 Grid it's not unusual for me to make something like a figure and even just scoot it off the side just to keep myself reminded of what the scale of this is going to be so we've got our particle group and I'll change our size up to two let's change our emitter color because we don't just want to be seeing green all the time we'll make a nice orangy color and if I emit the particles you see that we're going to be getting a constant flow of particles but what I'd like to do is let's just do a burst of them as we often do a shot of 10,000 particles and give it a speed of zero cool so now we get a burst of particles and they'll just sit there forever so I want to get some turbulence going in here so we'll say Okay turbulence I can say limit to that particle group let's give it a decent amount of power and a pretty big scale actually because it's pretty large this time but I want them to slow down a little bit I don't want them going crazy all the time and going faster and faster and faster so we'll make a friction and I'll drop the friction in there and say friction is pretty high if I hit play we'll get kind of this big cloud of orange particles and they're just drifting around doing their thing but something you'll notice is they're drifting in three dimensions so even though we started out let me show you we start out very flat the turbulence is making them drift all over the place but what if I wanted this to be 2D I want them to just stay in one spot always I don't want them to be going forward and backward on our Z here well that is where our handy dandy math node comes in so let's make a math node and drop this after the friction probably so you can see we have an operation the operation I just love how simple this is we have an operation and we can add subtract multiply divide a whole bunch of them but to me the most important one is assign we can just assign a value so I'm going to say I want to assign a value oop not divide I want to assign a value I want to assign a constant value of zero what value do I want to set to zero I want you can see we're already on the position I want the Z to constantly be set to zero so turbulence is trying to push it in all directions friction slows it down but math is after the fact going to say yeah but no matter how far you drifted on Z you're back to zero so now let's try this again I hit play you'll see we're getting these drifting around in all orientations but this time not all orientations it is flat on Z so it's able to no matter what I put in here no matter what forces what wins this math is going to say it has to stay twodimensional so look at this very different looking effect that we can get right away imagine you take that we can throw a tracer let's grab particle group make the Tracer on there limit it from the end let's do 22 frames now two-dimensionally we can get these lines drifting around making this cool pattern let's spin around again nice and flat like oh so cool so that is just math overriding everything so what can we override well we can override the position we can override the radius we can change the velocity we can change the velocity speed we can change the age we can say that all these particles are set to a New Age based on some condition let's rewind that and let's apply math in some other way now right now friction and turbulence are kind of taking things over a little bit I'm going to delete that friction and let's add on actually let's give them a little bit of speed right now I'm gonna say I want when the particles are born I want them to begin traveling upward so I want a velocity speed of let's just say 11 and I want the direction to be custom up on twir this down you say the vector of Y so it's saying travel upward on that Vector so if IIT play you see that o the turbulence is still going I'll turn that off so you see all these are being created and they're traveling upwards very very slowly so now let's make a new math node drop that inside and I'm going to say I want to add to your velocity speed actually let's not even add this could be a little bit crazy but I'm can say multiply and this is going to be crazy let's say that the current speed multiplying by one would equal the same amount it's like take your current value and equal your current value but let's say your speed is going to be 1.1 so it's getting 10% faster every single frame so let's hit play and now you see the particles start out slow and now they're going faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and they're going to keep on accelerating forever going crazy fast but we can almost build our own custom friction at as well now this time we don't have to multiply to go faster let's bring in the turbulence so they're going to be wiggling around again what I'm going to do is tell them to keep on going slower and slower so turbulence is trying to speed them up I'm going to tell the math to not multiply to make them faster I'm going to say multiply by 0.9 to make them go slower every single frame so now we want to hit play and now turbulence is constantly trying to add speed to it but the multiply is trying to slow them down so I've now used math to make my own custom friction on here I could say actually lose half of your speed every single frame and the turbulence is constantly adding in new speed but you see I've now made it slower we could set we could assign an absolute speed so now whatever number I type in here is the speed they have to go every particle regardless if the turbulence was strong or weak I've said this is the speed you have to go so the math modifier incredibly powerful honestly it's my go-to making simple conditions and then a math modifier is is so much of the power in the system and assign add and multiply are the ones I'm most often using so very exciting and you can change any of these via a constant or via a field or via another property excellent excellent excellent moving on we've got some more straightforward things some more straightforward conditions so let's simplify some of this oh and by the way really good idea to rename these so I've been naming this like math. Z just to know that's slowing it down and this math you know this would be math. maybe uh friction just so I know what those are supposed to be doing now let's delete those out uh let's change up our emitter I'll make it random this time and do another crazy color let's grab sky 3 this time so we'll get a bunch of particles getting emitted hit play okay they're looking nice let's delete out that Tracer so maybe we get a slightly better frame rate for the recording because again it's pretty good on my monitor so those are drifting around so we've got a condition or a modifier called kill seems pretty straightforward let's make some sort of condition so we'll just say Okay time condition the time condition will apply only to this particle group and we'll say when the time let's say say equals when it equals 55 there's a 100% chance and we haven't talked about that yet we have a chance that we can apply things so we'll say when it's exactly frame 55 there's 100% chance to kill everything that's met the condition so let's hit play we get our particles drifting around and right around here is frame 55 and then Boop all the particles die instantly let's change that time condition though let's say the time is greater than or equals so let's say starting at the time of 30 there is now a 10% chance that the particle dies but every single refresh every single frame the condition is going to be met again and again and again and again and every time there's a 10% chance of Any Given particle to just die to be killed by this modifier so now let's say play and we get all these particles drifting around doing their thing and now they slowly die off their lifetimes were still 100 but this kill modifier with a condition was able to have complete control over those so yeah kill condition is great and keep in mind like lots of ways of combining this if we made a field condition you make a field condition and put a spherical field in there make it nice and big and I'm going to get rid of that fall off so that is now a condition when that condition is met and I'll say yeah the tolerance is is fine so if I drop the kill condition in there as well so now when that condition is met it will kill them now the kill modifier has only one property and it has its own chance of killing things but now actually I think everything might die inside of it yeah everything instantly died inside of that Circle I wanted the opposite so in my field condition we could invert or I'll just go to my spherical field and say uh remapping invert so now hit play and now only stuff inside is valid but as soon as they drift out they're going to get killed but we can grab the kill and drop our chance down to 10% now as they escape you'll see some of them get to live for a little while but eventually they'll get caught up because they're rolling the dice again and again and again and again and some they will eventually die some might live for a really long time but yeah that's so cool so yeah simple conditions and simple modifiers that's where a lot of the power comes in now moving on let's look at our switch group switch group is pretty straightforward and we haven't really done too much of this but what I'd like to do is do the exact same condition so this field condition and I wanted to switch to a new group now we don't have another group yet so let's just make one so I'll say okay here's a new particle group and we'll just call this a group. switched and just so we can see it I'm going to actually no let's not do that uh we'll do it with a condition because I love doing those with conditions so when this condition is met so when that condition is met I will say I want to switch the group so I drop this inside now it already knows what group it's in so now I'm say switch it to this group now when it switches groups like that's cool it's going to switch the group but not really much changes one thing you will see that is this group only has a size of of one where that this one has two so you actually do see the change but I'm gonna say draw the size two and now we can't even tell we can't tell what is happening except the condition of the turbulence is only the ones that are inside the circle the ones outside the circle aren't meeting that condition because they are a separate group so as soon as those Escape outside of the field condition the turbulence is no longer applied now they're still drifting but we could now inside of this new group do something like make a simple friction so they'll very quickly lose all of their energy so they get flung out from the middle switch groups and then slow down look how simple that was to put together now in addition to that there are all these other modifiers so we could do something like a color mapper let's make a brand new color mapper currently it's applying everything but I'll say hey this only applies in this condition so in this condition what will happen well I'll just say pretty much I want it to always happen so we have a direct field that we could apply but I'm thinking let's just say if the age is from zero to zero essentially it just means always I'll just say hey turn them red we'll say an absolute color so anything outside of that group instantly gets everything applied and as soon as those exit you see they get their color swapped as well so instantly switching between them keep in mind this is threedimensional so they are going in forward you know in front of and in back of it so it might be a good time to reintroduce that math and I I do this all the time you're going to see me do it all the time to make this two-dimensional so we'll put this math in actually it will always be happening after the turbulence and I want to assign the position of z a value of zero so now this is become two-dimensional so now these will drift only exactly as you see them and the red dots will only be outside the circle oh so cool so that's working excellently exactly what I want and now it just starts turning into what do we want to make like it's incredible the things we can do we've now switched groups and every group can have its own conditions we could now say yeah there's friction there but let's add in some gravity so we'll grab one of our gravity forces drop that in as well the friction will get applied but I think this will start falling a little bit so all those red ones begin falling out of the scene and as soon as the blue exit they turn red and they immediately start drifting downward now we could add more conditions in we could this is where things start getting super crazy is we've now got this switched group group but what if we make another field condition I'm going to duplicate this very first one and let's just scoot it down so now we've got a second condition right there and this time I'm GNA say what do I want well I want to switch the group back to the original group again so it's going to swap back now even though it's going to swap back that means turbulence will reactivate but the color you know these colors were uniquely created at that moment but in our color mapper we now say well that condition was met so I want to set them to a field color and I'll grab a random field and that's already got some color so I'll say remap the gradient and yeah let's turn them black and white so in this case when this field is hit this field it's going to remap the colors again and it's going to switch the group back to the original one now keep in mind you definitely want to make sure that your color or these properties get applied before you switch the group like I said order of operation matters if the switch group comes before it it will have switched to the other group and therefore the color mapper can't apply because it's not even part of the group anymore so definitely yeah you can trip over that if you're not careful so let's let these start falling and as they pass through here oh looks like I modified the I I swapped the wrong uh color wrapper but yeah these will turn black and white and as they fall this one they're going to get swapped to the red group or modified to turn red so like ah like look at how much power how crazy this is and like we've barely scratch the surface this is just the raw potential it's crazy so uh I think think it's time to start a new scene because we're getting a little bit crazy on that one so let's move on to the next we'll Begin by deleting everything because you know everything else is default settings and see what shape should we make this time this time let's make a spline emitter so we'll start out with a h let's make a cog wheel spline and that's selected so when I create my spline emitter you will see that the emitter automatically got fed the Cog wheel if we hit play We Are emitting particles from it excellent so just to be more visible let's crank up the size a bit and this time we want to do the look so here's my thought we've got some particles emitting uh let's get more of them so let's time this time let's do a constant so it'll be constantly making 1,000 particles they can be moving relatively fine yeah they'll be moving kind of quickly and I mean I like to distinguish them so we'll apply some random color this time we'll just make our own random color so let's make them kind of a crazy um yeah that'll work so kind of as purple to green and hit play and now we're randomly creating those colors drifting around doing their thing so now uh how about we display these as actual objects we'll clone onto them so grabbing that particle group I'll say we got a cloner actually selecting it didn't do anything I'll set that the object and then drag in our particle group and I will say that yeah we could take on the scale of the particle if we want to but honestly I don't even care about that so what I do want to do is clone onto them I want to clone not a cone let's do do a pyramid and I think Z is always forward so we'll say z+ and we'll make the pyramid way smaller so let's do 11 XYZ so we'll do 11 by 11 by 20 so we kind of got this pointy pyramid that is so not true let's go 22 on that one end at 11 so there we go there is now facing forward we got this longer pyramid to kind of give us an orientation drop that inside of our cloner and now you see they're cloned all over and automatically took on the color very nice uh we can also set our cloner to multi and most of the time with particles you can do that uh if you're running like simulations and stuff you can't but otherwise that's just going to make it run way quicker so let's allow those to zip around and you see they are in the correct orientation based on what they're doing but these particles as they are currently set up are just going to fly Forward Forever so let's add a turbulence in there and notice when I add this turbulence in and it's applying everywhere so we'll give it not too much strength and we'll give it 11 and why is it doing that I must have been clicking Tilda and give it some pretty big scale so like 200 and if I hit play we should start seeing those forces get applied it's going to be drifting around doing their own thing that's fine now they are going to go faster and faster and faster so I always like throwing in a friction as well just to slow them down again so things don't get too crazy is 10 enough um yeah they don't seem to be getting too crazy now okay so we get these drifting around but this is not affecting their Direction their position is drifting around but not their Direction and this is where look comes in it's actually really straightforward we can activate look and drop it order of operations it should be the last thing happening you can now see that they are looking in the direction that they're traveling so instantly via this we're getting kind of some cool flocking looking thing going on but just getting that orientation goes a really long way now keep in mind we got an up Direction so they're aligned upward their forward orientation is based on the velocity direction I feel like 90% of the time that's probably what you're going to want to reach for now you can add some variation on the velocity direction we can change their alignment but for the most part I don't think you need to change those very often one thing I actually haven't I literally haven't done it I've assumed I understood what it does but we've got this look rate so what I'd like to do is make these be zipping around really quick like really changing their orientation so I think I'm going to increase our strength and decrease the scale so now in theory yeah you see that these are going to be turning and twitching really quickly because you know the noise is very random now they're in ly applying to this orientation but if we grab and an apologies for the frame rate ah it's driving me crazy like I hope uh hope everybody's cool with that um we can keep yeah well I can't think of way of making it go smoother so let's keep going anyway these are drifting around doing their thing under look we've got our look rate I'm going to say 25% so to me that means it's going to take every frame it's going to rotate 25% of the way toward Wards the orientation so that means it'll turn slowly so it's going to start drifting then it rotates yeah as he spin around that's it's working exactly as expected it to the look is slowly going to rotate to their current orientation so as the zip around quickly there's going to be a lot of lag to the rotation so that's that's really cool so I'll go back up to 100% like I said most of the time you probably want it to be 100% And we get these drifting around so that is the look modifier but that's going to be coming important when it comes to the next two which is Spin and turn now honestly I haven't used these too much so uh why don't we I'm going to give this file a save and instead of using this look let's start playing around with a spin now honestly we haven't even played with a spin when it comes to the emitter so we could go to the original spline emitter we can twirl a bunch of this up and we've got our alignment so the initial direction that they're going to be looking when they're created so if play you see they're just automatically on their velocity Direction with a regular up Vector but we could change this to just be tangental or based on a Target we can say based on an a particular axis so if I say z+ when I play they're all going to be aiming exactly the same orientation now look would force them to rotate into the proper spot but now these are all uniform so now we get the option of adding some angular velocity so let's add on I'm not sure how much I'll say 45 and let's hit play and see what we get so now okay yeah now they are seemingly just spinning around randomly and it's based on their initial velocity direction so we could set that to be random on their initial orientation and now they sh just randomly spin now it's not spinning too quick so this must be a slower value so we can crank up to 90 go a little bit quicker and we can see them start to drift and rotate around so anyway that is basic angular velocity we can actually just see it now I'll get rid of that and the angular velocity yeah that should be zero the axis I mean typically I would want that to be based on their velocity direction so we could go back to that and let these start drifting and uh let's limit them hope maybe it'll speed up the recording if I say only make these I'm going to emit only for right now it's constant I'll set it to a range so it's only emitting for the first 15 frames so hit go and now we get a couple emissions and that that's going to keep it a little bit lighter okay so they're drifting around now you know pretty straightforward let's slow down that turbulence it's pretty strong right now now and let's add in some spin so after everything else has happened I'm going to say give it some spin add speed is an option set speed and set speed plus a vector so we'll just add in some speed on the spin so I'll say 90 and you see all these are going to spin now we said add speed so it's constantly adding more and more and more we could set the speed so now these are all forced to rotate at exactly 90 and we can add some speed variation if we wanted to speed these up to maybe 360 now but anyway you can see this will add spin on top of it and we can go go really fancy and set like a particular Vector Direction So based on the alignment spin 360 based on a particular direction we could do a global one and all these will give different properties all them are just required for whatever particular thing you're trying to build okay so that is spin next up is turn and now turn is an interesting one because it can throw you off if you're not using it very precisely so here's what I'm thinking let's start completely from scratch except I'm going to keep my cloner so I will make a basic emitter and this could be more simple I'm going to do a shot of one so we're going to emit exactly one particle hit play and boom one particle clone onto that and now we get a single clone so now let's say I want to also look in the proper direction it's going to be looking in the velocity direction so always forward so we have play and that's going to be traveling forward so now we get a really cool option called turn now if we put turn on all the time it's going to look weird so we need a condition the condition for me will be a time condition the time condition says when the scene time equals let's say 30 frames now we want to add a turn so I drop the turn inside of the time condition and let's say that based on its current alignment I want on z+ it to do a turn of I'm G say 180 but I think it's always half the number I'm not sure I haven't done this in a bit so if I play it travels forward and at frame 30 suddenly we're going to get a turn actually it's a pretty subtle turn I'm going to change that to X+ let's see what that does hit play and now at frame 30 it suddenly turns 90° on X now I think yeah its orientation wasn't perfectly straight there but you see we got that sharp turn suddenly happened now we could change this time condition to something like a pulse so now it's going to start at frame zero and then for a duration of exactly one frame let's say every 30 frames it's going to do that again in fact let's speed it up to 15 frames and it has a 100% chance of succeeding so now if we had play every 15 frames is suddenly going to turn another 90° so like that's really fun it's very important though that you combine the turn with the look if it's not constantly looking forward then the turn is not going to have a new orientation to be based off of I've mult multiple times I've made rigs where I didn't turn on or I forgot to make a look and it just wasn't working I was like why isn't the turn working I kept thinking there's a wrong condition but turned out is because I didn't have this look activated so keep that in mind very important detail but yeah now you get these turning every once in a while we don't have the time to make it right now but here is a final version of me exploring the turn concept and here you can see that I'm making multiple particles and I'm selecting exactly half of them and I got two different groups that alternates between but if I play you can see that I'm going to get a series of particles traveling out and every set amount of time it's suddenly going to randomly turn one way or the other and I kind of get this cool networking effect and that is using the uh look and the turn so yeah without both of those yeah here's the look of getting applied everything and then it turns so yeah cool networking effect you can apply on top of that all right so that was look Spin and turn next up we have blend flock and prey blend blend is goingon to be quick but flock and prey ah those are the most fun okay W this video is going to be so long well I I hope everybody's enjoying all the new particle stuff and you're getting as excited about it as I am so let's open up a new file and start from scratch so blend in order to do this one actually I think we only need one particle stream I don't really have a plan for this one but let's make an emitter and I think we will again do a lot of randomized color this one actually could be pretty interesting let's make uh the full colors but I'm going to yank out some of these cooler colors so we'll keep the purple we'll get rid of all those blues and right click to distribute the knots Okay cool so bunch of different colors and I'm going to do a bunch of different r radiuses so or is that radi I'll do a radius of five with a variation of five so if I hit play you're going to see we're going to get a bunch of particles all flying out oh I want to see the radius so we'll activate the draw radius and let's increase the size okay so we got a large radius amount of variation and a bunch of different colors so now let's make this blend it's applying everywhere or we say apply only to that group and now it's got a radius and a percentage of blending so So currently it's trying to blend the color so if I play I'm not sure any of the radiuses are that close but let's see those kind of seem clustered but let's increase the radius significantly so I'll say 55 so if I play now now you see as time goes on the colors are all blending into each other let's make the strength a little bit weaker so you can see we're starting out with these rainbow colors and as time goes on they're looking at all their neighbors and they're blending the colors together and it looks like the final colors are sort of this orangey yellow as those continue to get Blended now we can only blend one property at a time so let's make a duplicate of that blend and this time we'll do blend. Rus and let's swap that to radius so we got all these different radi here hit play and slowly over time we're hopefully going to see those start blending into each other until all of them have exactly the same radius nearby each other that slow fall off so there are a lot of applications of this keep in mind right now we're saying do this all the time but we could have a really High number happening only where there's a particular condition in fact why don't we do that let's have the radii get uniform only when a particular condition is met and we'll keep that simple actually why don't we just have a we'll have a pulse happen so we'll do a Time condition so we'll say every pulse for a duration of one frame and we'll put uh I don't know we'll say 50 frames in between hits play and you see we got a bunch of variation and then hopefully you get a blip and we got 100% blending yep suddenly all those radiuses became identical and suddenly all of those become pretty much identical now we could change those we could say that the duration is five and now the blend radius will take a little bit of time we'll say like 25% maybe it needs to be higher but now suddenly every pulse will suddenly get them becoming more uniform hopefully somewhat rapidly it's a little bit subtle let's Crank that back up to 55 yeah you you kind of see it now where they're here and then Z they all kind of get more uniform so the ability to put additional conditions on here I think would go a really long way you can do a lot of fun wacky things with this even that we're applying a blend everywhere we keep on putting on more and more conditions where we could put a different condition let's say we have a let's do a field condition and this field condition will be random so we just add a random field on there and we even give this a random number and that random one could have some animation and what is it going to be doing well let's say it is going to be using math to yeah that's a field condition so we'll say math and it will be multiplying the radius by it's happening all the time so let's say 1.1 maybe it gets out of control I don't know we're making this up as we go but let's hit play and now hopefully we see the math yeah some of these are getting way bigger really quickly and then when the other conditions are met is going to try and average them and you suddenly see the averaging happen and they all popped into way closer in the same size size the math is adding like way too much so let's say add one so they'll be constantly growing but they shouldn't be getting exponentially bigger so even that's pretty quick so all getting bigger bigger bigger and then suddenly they all get averaged out bigger bigger bigger bigger averaged out so yeah again think of all the crazy stuff we can do combining these so the blend opens up a lot of pretty cool opportunities but now we're getting into my favorite two which is flock and predator and prey so let's start again from scratch as always and and we need a big flat two-dimensional thing going on so let's make another basic emitter set it to Circle this time and we need to be pretty big so let's say 500 I want a shot of let's say a thousand yeah thousand that's a thousand enough let's hit play no thousand not enough 10,000 always 10,000 so what do we want we want a speed of zero and we want some random colors as always so let's make a actually let's make a nois based that could be fun so load full Colors Let's uh pick some colors a little bit more strictly that'll work distribute knots right click double and double and distribute again and yeah let's just see what the emission looks like this time hit play okay some emission there I'll make that a little bit bigger 999 little coherence on it yeah that'll work a lot of blue but that'll work uh and we all see it a little bit better so we'll double size of those dots okay now this is two-dimensional with no depth on the Z so hopefully that means that I don't need to flatten it out with a math to crush the Z's into zero so my thought is Let's Make A Flock and it's applied to everything right now and there's a bunch of different settings now we're just going to step through it very slowly and carefully so we can see exactly what it's doing I would like the cohesion strength to be zero so mostly we're just taking a look at the separator strength by default it is 2.5 I'm going to set up to five and let's get some friction in here to slow everything down so friction and we Crank that up to like 100 so it slows it down a bit hitting refresh we'll hit play and now let's see what we get oh look right away the flocking behavior is saying to separate everything up to a radius of five with a power of one and look at this gorgeous nice even separation that we're getting right away like that's so good we never had the ability to do that in cinema before like with any of the built-in tools so immediately that's a really cool looking Mosaic I am digging it and that is just using separation strength like oh man just think of what you could make with that and luckily yeah I was right it was two-dimensional to start out with and it couldn't push it on Z because there was no Z so it stayed two- dimensional all righty now let's push that a little bit further let's add in some cohesion so this time we'll say no separation strength and let's add in cohesion of one and just see what happens so all these are hanging out it play and it's very slow uh so let's maybe increase our cohesion radius bigger and look now you can see we get these clusters and they're all coalescing into these little groups they kind of turn the worms and they eventually a little group and if they're further than 22 away then they end up in their own little isolated pockets so you can see these now want to cluster on top of each other so very different behavior of course things get interesting when you use cohesion and separation at the same time typically I think you want stronger separation so we'll say separation of two but a smaller radius so big blobs want to come together but they don't want to be on top of each other what's cool is we can just hit play and continue from here adding in the stronger separation strength so now all them want to push apart to be at least five apart from each other so we hit play and now suddenly see these oh that's so cool imagine that as an animation so suddenly get all these little individual explosions and they all spread out now the radius of five is probably enough that it's going to fill up whole circle again so let's change that radius down to something pretty small like two so now with a radius of two we'll see them Rec coales a little bit so they don't want to be completely on top of each other but you end up with all these gaps in between and look at those shapes that are emerging automatically like oh that's so cool and so yeah I really like Flock there is a lot of possibilities this entire thing is still completely two-dimensional of course it could become three-dimensional just by adding in a little bit of variation in fact even right now let's see what happens I'm going just continuing from this animation let's make this one longer let's add in turbulence and I'm going to add in very little strength just like one and that suddenly means it's going to give it some Z depth and all these very flat blobs are probably going to look a lot smaller because my assumption is Imagine these like little drops of water on a patri dish but then suddenly they're floating in zero g and they'll turn more into like little spheres or little blobs so let's hit play and now as soon as we introduce that Z depth like yeah look they're getting smaller but now you see they've become threedimensional little blobs all hanging out and squished into each other like there's so much power here and imagine just you we haven't even done any conditions for this we haven't done a bunch of layering we've just changed a couple of these values you could just key frame some of these things or trigger them at different times you could be triggering a stronger flock of cohesion and maybe a weaker separation at a different time so in this case maybe you want to separate these back out again so let's say that my separation radius is going to become a lot larger again but I'll weaken it so they want to spread out but not too powerfully so hit play and suddenly they all start pushing out and we get bigger blobs because it's a bigger radius we could get rid of our cohesion strength entirely and if we let that play the turbulence and everything will let those start drifting apart slowly because they're not cohering at all you see I mean think about the medical animation applications of this of like germs spreading and whatnot like oh there's so much going on there so absolutely love this effect like I said those two are my favorite we haven't gotten the second one together now there are other settings here here we've got the overall strength we could change the maximum speed so you could say maybe there's really strong cohesion like really strong but that would make them move quickly but you say no the maximum speed would be really low so they'd have to move slowly even though it's a really powerful stickiness that's cohesion we got the radius we've also got velocity alignment this one doesn't feel important until you get rid of it and then you realize how important it is where it's making everything within a particular radius take on the speed of its neighbors and it makes it so that blobs aren't all jittery so yeah velocity alignment very important we could think of that as its own Standalone tool we were just using blend but in this case we could say hey get rid of cohesion get rid of separation and now tell all the particles within a certain distance of each other to take on each other's speed so velocity alignment very powerful we've got a concept called excluded groups we're going to be seeing more of this when it comes to the Predator prey but I guess I should show it off right now let's go and make this rig a little bit different what I'm going to do is make two different groups uh change the colors a little bit so it's a little bit more coherent so under our properties let's go and I probably got to load this from scratch because that's too many knots to mess around with so we'll grab this one and we'll make a bunch of cool colors right there so we'll double the knots and distribute so yeah some cool colors on that one and now let's duplicate that emitter copy and paste and let's remake this one to be warm colors so let's just yank some of these off actually we just load in the fiery preset that'll work and yank that away and distribute the knots Okay cool so we got two different ones now this second emitter I guess yeah actually we can make there be just as many on both of them so there's G to be a lot of particles I guess we should grab both of them and cut them in half so we'll say 5,000 instead of 10,000 so 10,000 total and this would be a good chance to put in a different random seed so they don't spawn exactly on top of each other now I don't want the turbulence so let's keep it 2D and we still have the friction so everything should be behaving exactly like we saw before but we have more colors now so you can see we've got two different groups of them two different types of colors and that's working nicely so what I want to do is grab both of these groups and we should probably name them accordingly I think this upper one is the worm colors this one is the cool colors now let's grab both those groups and make a new multi-group and drop this down I'm going to say that the flocking and the friction should happen in the multi- group so it is applying to everything but now that they're in a multigroup we have the ability to go into the flock and say exclude certain groups from having the effect they're going to be in the calculation but the final effect of the calculation isn't going to get applied to them so what happens in that case and honestly I'm not even sure so let's say that the cool group is not going to be affected it's going to affect the warm group but it itself will not get affected so now we hit play and now we see that yeah look all the worm ones kind of scoot around trying to escape but the blue ones they're they're not moving at all because they are excluded uded from that calculation so yeah that's pretty cool look at that and it is still staying two- dimensional because there is no Z depth so yeah including or excluding them that can go a long way we can add some additional separation radius so let's say they have to push apart further from each other and add in some cohesion at maybe an even larger radius keep in mind the larger the radius the long longer the calculation will have to be because every particle is having to check a bigger circle around itself to see how many it should grab oh look this is really cool all those blue ones aren't moving so these red ones are essentially flowing through the empty gaps to try and Escape because of all that Force so only these little channels are allowing to escape that is not what I was expecting and that's really cool wow look at that so yeah you really start seeing some of the possibilities here like this is crazy look at it slowly blobbing out like I think given enough time almost all of these warm colored ones would escape from here unless you know some of them will probably be like trapped inside somewhere but that's so cool oh my goodness now I wonder what happen if we add in some of that Dimension by giving it the z-axis so we turn on this turbulence and suddenly everything's going to drift around and these red ones are going to have the ability to I guess it wasn't too crazy because they all just kind of drifted from each other now they're going to blob into themselves but the blue ones are just going to drift thanks to turbulence those aren't trying to independently blob so yeah look at those cool rings that were made anyway ah so much fun so much we're going to be able to do with the flocking effect by itself in fact maybe I should save that for the demo part because this video is going to be incredibly long I'm sorry like there there just these particles it's so powerful right now we're just trying to step through some of the options I'm not even talking about every single setting inside of them and this is still going to be an insanely long video and we're not even doing particular like demos of things we can make we're just showing how to use each of these tools so anyway it's gonna be crazy okay up next is predator prey and actually we need a very similar setup here so I think we should continue working from this file deleting out turbulence deleting out flock because we don't need those actually well we we'll probably bring back some flock but let's wait a little bit so here's the thought uh I want a lot fewer of these warm particles in fact just to make it super clear what is what let's make them only orange and red so we can't confuse them and the cool particles H that's probably fine we'll just make them fully cool colors okay I want a lot fewer of these red ones so let's make there only be like 500 of them so when we haveit play it's going to be static and suddenly we'll get a bunch of particles you see we get some red ones we got a bunch of blue actually even that is still probably too many red so drop that to 100 cool hit play there we go now Predator prey what does that do now I think yeah well we're going use a multi-group again it's it's helpful it doesn't have to how do we say this I'm gonna turn off the Multi Group so we aren't worried about it but I think we will want it in the end so let's create Predator prey and now it's applying to everything again so we have a predator Group which group is the Predator group I'm going to say that the warm ones are the Predator group and the cool group is going to be the prey group so you'll see very similar settings to what we had inide of the flock where we have a Pursuit strength and how far are they looking and then we have a flee strength and how far are they looking for that now without changing any settings just with this default and you see nothing in the scene is happening except for predator prey i h play Let's see we get you see these red ones immediately start moving towards the blue ones and the blue on ones once they notice the red ones getting close to them are starting to move away really quickly and the red ones will automatically find a new Target and start traveling in its direction so the red ones chase the blue ones around so pretty cool right there now let's create that friction or activate the friction it can be applied everywhere so it just slows everything down so everything's not drifting forever so you see these red ones starting to pursue and the blue ones trying to flee so here's what I'm thinking we can start changing the behaviors we can say that the pursue the pursuing ones are going to move quickly and have a relatively small radius and we'll say that the fleeing ones will have a larger radius but they're fleeing a little bit more slowly let's just see what that behavior is so now you see the blue ones more aggressively are are running away but the red ones can be really quick and are kind of sticking on one of the particles if it catches the particle it just keeps on chasing it forever so maybe we could make the let's make the fleeing ones even quicker so I'm gonna say okay the ones can flee really quick so when it spots something coming at it they run away so now the red ones are having trouble seeing anything else and eventually they don't see anything within the radius and they just stop so that's pretty interesting now what I'm thinking is let's combine this with some flocking Behavior creating a flock this time I'm going to say I want the flock to only apply to the cool group and I'm going to say they don't cohere at all but they will separate from each other and actually yeah we'll see what this radius does right now what this means and I'll even continue from here the blue ones are all clustered up but they want to spread out they're on top of each other so you see them starts spreading out I will increase that radius so now you see them want to spread out but they you see they're trying to avoid the red ones because they're scared of them so now you see we get this lovely spreading out but avoiding the red one so even there a different Behavior we now have particles avoiding certain spots based on their radius that's funny if any of these red ones saw a blue it would suddenly start moving I wouldn't be surprised if eventually one does get too close let's change the behavior a little bit we can go back into Predator prey let's increase that Pursuit let's actually make the numbers even so the fleeing ones will always be quicker the pursuit ones actually we'll say the pursuing ones can see even further so we have play again and suddenly they're all going to activate because they can see everything but all these other ones are running away they're really trying to escape and look at this oh look at this organic animation that we're starting to get it's kind of flowing around it's almost got like a liquid Vibe because our flock our flocking behavior is constantly spreading them back out again so there's almost a liquid effect going on and all of these red ones are chasing the blue ones around so these two things combined are creating such interesting behaviors it's absolutely insane now we could be doing additional forces here all the blue ones are drifting further out but we could say hey I want everything to start drifting in just a little bit a little bit of power where everything wants to hang out near the middle so I'm G to make a field force and like I said I don't like using the attractor it has weird fallof so I'll make a spherical field make it really big so I'll just crank that number way up so we say like 5,000 so we're definitely inside the radius I don't want any fall off so we'll crank up that inner radius and what's cool about this is you see it's actually creating a direction right there it's pulling everything it's either pushing it out or in I can never remember which one I'll visually hide that and Field Force should only apply to the flock so after they flock actually flocking will come after the Field Force so let's just see with a strength of five that's pretty weak we'll say 15 and just see if they start to move in or out looks like they're moving out so I got to grab my spherical field and say in oh go to Direction and invert the direction so now they pull Inward and yeah now they're pulling in let's go to the field force and turn off the display because that's just unnecessary calculations now if I hit play all of those slowly are going to want to pull inward so nothing will drift out too far and of course our predators are always going to want to move back in so you see all these starting to pull in but the pulling in force isn't super strong maybe it maybe is too strong maybe it'll start compressing but the flocking behavior is trying to push them back out from each other so you see everything drifting in and now we might have like this endless animation of these chasing around the blue ones and it'll just never end so pretty fun like along these lines like I don't know I could just stare at this forever this would be a dangerous thing to do honestly trying to learn the particle system has been very dangerous because there's just so much fun and weird exploration of behaviors you can get and all of this with essentially without any conditions like it's crazy okay so having done that like there's so many more things we could do we could make a a flocking behavior that only affects actually we can even do this let's duplicate a flocking behavior into the warm group and what am I going to do well this time I don't care about cohesion what I care is that they want to separate from each other the Predators don't want to hang out near each other like these two very close to each other so I'm gon to say okay they have a very strong separation desire and I'll make a relatively large radius and this isn't too dangerous because there's very few of them so the calculations won't take too long so let's just stare at this spot right here and see if they suddenly separate from each other look at them immediate instantly changed Direction because it didn't want to hang out near another Predator so now we'll get some natural separation there we've added more behavior in so we can let this keep running they'll keep on chasing things around now in theory we could we could do a lot of things where we could maybe increase the speed of the Predators and we could slow down the prey I mean think of this we could you know all of these eventually could be clones like you could be cloning let's say like these are wolves and sheep you could be cloning a bunch of sheep onto these particles they'd be taking on the direction they could have some built-in animation oh that reminds me I got to talk about having animation be driven by the particles but you have sheep with a natural animation and as they move around they'd be getting chased by like maybe these wolf models and those could be animated and maybe the Sheep models as the particle just get older maybe the particles slow down so as they get older they get slower and maybe as the wolf particles get older maybe they speed up because they're getting desperate to eat maybe it's not maybe it's not their age so much but you think of it like their hunger like they're getting hungrier as they get um weaker and that means they go faster and faster trying to catch them so desperate wolves might Chase around slower older sheep and then you could imagine that we could have new actually we haven't even talked about reproduce there's so much to talk about this video is going to be so long I should have broken down this section in the chapters as well but oh well too late for that okay so yeah you see all these traveling around doing their thing really cool but there are still more behaviors that we haven't talked about inside of Predator prey if we scroll down you'll see that we have another set that's it's really cool and it is contact and this is saying what happens in this case if one of the red dots catches one of the blue dots what will happen and we got a bunch of different things we've got a contact radius and I think the I forget the contact radius I think is the pursue I which that said uh prey strength and or Predator strength instead Pursuit strength but it's going to be a percentage of the radius of the pursuit radius I'm pretty sure now what should happen well we could kill the prey we could kill the Predator we could kill both of them we could convert the prey into a predator we could convert the prey and Predator into something else we can convert just a predator we can convert the predator and kill the prey so we got all these different behaviors but here's what I'm thinking if we get within a certain radius let's convert let's just convert the group to be a predator so all I have to do is grab my warm group and drop it into the convert to and this 10% might be way too small but I'm going to set it so that the pursuers are going to be a little bit quicker actually yeah let's say 3.1 so just a little bit quicker than the prey let's just see what happens maybe I don't even have these settings correct so now we hit play and suddenly the Predators are going to be chasing around a little bit more and we've got that convert group so let's see if we can spot someplace where they start going and maybe they can eventually catch one actually we didn't do a contact Behavior right now contact behavior is none but there is group convert so I don't know if that actually does it so let's just see what happens let's let them keep going I don't really see a behavior although maybe that's like a separate thing convert group to blah blah blah let's just clear that out and say let's just convert let's convert prey oh we know we probably do need both of these I'm going to say convert the prey and the converted prey will convert to warm so sorry my mistake so now if I play now as they get closer Let's see we need them to actually catch so I might need to speed them up a little bit more but I love the flow of these things um so I don't really see many conversion so let's again let's speed up our pursuers so now suddenly they're running around a little bit quicker quicker quicker come on let's see nope hasn't caught yet the the prey are really good at running around right now oh but look how powerfully they're chasing them around right now oh oh oh I just realized ah man there's so many things to keep in mind here but it's working do you see how we get all these little gaps here it's like well why are there all these little gaps because they're being converted to the group but being converted to a group doesn't mean you convert to those colors you keep the color you were born with so we need to start this over again and we need to add an additional condition so I'm thinking that we add in a condition here uh there's two things we can do right now it's just straight up convert it to a group but we could do additional things what's the simplest thing I want to keep it simple for you so I'm thinking we just use a color mapper and we'll just put that in the warm group so essentially I'm going to be constantly every single frame overriding all the color of all the particles in the warm group and we'll just drop that down and I'm just saying hey always convert it to Red always so having done that when we hit play you see all those are now just bright red but now as these are pursuing if they swap to that group it's going to be constantly constantly switching the converted prey into Predators so now let's see if we start getting more red ones so as this plays you can see I'm running around running around running around and I feel like yeah it's I'm looking at any one particular spot but I feel like they're starting to get to be a lot more red dots as they go and eventually there'll be so many red dots that the blues won't be able to escape from anything right now the only thing saving them is that all the Reds want to stay away from each other because of that really heavy flocking Behavior so yeah I just saw one get oh that one just got converted right there so yeah they're definitely starting to catch the prey and we got this really cool Behavior like kind of very cellular looking like man that is looking so cool um so yeah they're going to keep on going they're going to keep on converting I mean let's just turn off or maybe the flocking Behavior will make the radius really small so they'll trying to avoid each other but only like a radius of five so now they can start clustering up more so yeah now now you see that they can cluster now you see they're really starting to spread out and oh my goodness look at them start to spread so quickly so the blues at this point are pretty doomed where like all these red ones chasing them down all of this power just from the Predator prey like look at all of these emergent behaviors that we can get like it's absolutely crazy and we you know we could have additional groups in here we could have like a neutral party we could have the red ones trying to get near maybe particles that represent plants where it's like oh the Sheep are trying to eat the grass the grass keeps on growing the Sheep are going to the grass but the the Wolves would keep on chasing them around but you see we just have a couple final blue ones trying to escape that they have entire flocks chasing after them entire packs of wolves trying to catch but the wolves are faster So eventually they will catch them There Is No Escape watch him go a couple are joining in I can't believe how long that one is living there we go oh we finally got caught so much fun to play around with predator prey I've probably spent too much time on this one already but you can tell that this one's probably my favorite one the natural behavior we get from flocking is amazing but Predator prey is behaviors before we get to these final four modifiers why don't we take a look at the reproduce because I think we might want to use that a little bit here so uh we haven't used any mesim meters in a while so I'll create one of those I want a spear shape and I'll drop this inside of the emission so it should appear on the surface I would like a shot of exactly 100 particles with a speed of zero excellent we play we get a couple of particles appearing on the surface we'll hide the sphere because we don't need to see it and let's make the particles larger so we can see them now we can make a reproduce emitter Now by default under reproduction you're going to see that it is essentially scattering one point so I think every frame is going to create one new particle from some particle in the scene and the reason we have this distribute on by default is this get really exponential really fast so let's hit play and you'll see that okay we emit a particle we emit another particle there's a couple little ones right there and they'll keep on emitting but if we watch as it keeps going even the new particles it made its own particles it might spawn particles from there so if we had something like per particle we might start getting a cascading effect where it there'd be a ton of particles really quick really dangerous actually so we need to limit that somehow so one way of limiting that is I don't want to emit particles from every particle in the scene because right now there's no limiting condition on it so let's move these to the bottom and I'll drop the reproduce emitter into the particle group of the mesh emitter so that means it cannot make new particles from itself it can only make them from these particles so now these red particles can only emit from the green particles so that's excellent that gives us a lot of control moving inside the reproduce we'll see a lot of familiar settings but it's also the most different emitter so the very first thing have is enable if it's on we have the total count of particles right now we've got a decent amount so I don't want to change that and then we've got our scatter eventually we're going to change this to per particle but not quite yet but the first setting I want to play with is kill Source what that means is if one of these green particles creates one of the reproduced particles it will kill the original particle so let's turn that on and see what we get now when I hit play you're going to see that every time we get a new emission one of the old particle goes away until we have just these new ones so that can be a handy way to stop this from getting out of control so I think we might actually utilize that idea but let's modify it a little bit instead of Distributing this particle why don't we say per particle so like every particle is going to emit all the time and right now every particle is going to emit a single particle so if we rewind hit play you're going to see that every single green particle instantly died and all of these particles got born so it pretty much looks like that perfect sphere and then they all start traveling off the side well let's go a little bit fancier here I don't want this to happen all the time so we can use a condition of some sort and this goes to where I was talking about the time condition can act like a plane affector if I create a Time condition I can drop it inside this particle group and drop our reproduce inside of that what is the time condition I want I want it to be always this comparison will say greater than or equals to and that just means this is always executing but now I can go to this chance and say I want only a 1% chance that that executes at all so now my reproduce is per particle going to create a single particle but there's only a 1% Chance On Any Given refresh so you can see that it's again slowly applying but what we can do now is modify these particles where I can say well I want to create 11 particles every time this happens so you see we get that little cluster but they're all flowing off in One Direction that's not very interesting let's move under properties and here our velocity is based on a current axis so you can see right now it's just on z+ and that's why they're traveling off that way but what I would like to do is say it's not based on the axis I want them to be random so now they have a random direction from when they spawned so if I play we'll suddenly get a little burst of particles flying off so from here we could just start controlling things very directly where maybe the lifetime is very short so let's say they only last for 11 frames and I'll put some variation of five on there so we got a little bit of range so if I have play we're going to get a little burst the particle dies and then these are going to survive for a little while and eventually all those are going to pop and fade away and we are able to reproduce particles from other ones and not have it go crazy Cascade everywhere now keep in mind there's only a 1% chance that any of these pop so any given particle it might live for a really long time because every time it's rolling a die and it has to roll a one essentially for that one to pop so it could last for a really long time potentially we could key frame our time conditions chance up higher and higher and higher in case we really wanted to make sure that we got them all in specific time but I think that works pretty well now we can just start making this fancier from here we could do something like have all these particles emit maybe we'll give it some speed variation so a little bit of speed variation and then we'll have them go you they're emitting pretty quick so then we can create a friction it has its own group right here already so we'll drop friction under there make the friction pretty high so they're going to burst quickly and then those will slow down so yeah nice little bursts there but let's push this further because there's a lot of properties that we can take from the original emitter and put into this reproduce emitter so one of those would be the color now right now if we were to go into reproduce under properties scroll down to color you can see that right now they're just spawning as red we could change that that any color right now you see it's pretty faded out but I can grab color inheritance and crank that up all the way and now instead of being this red color they will 100% be green they took on the color of the emitter but let's go and make these original particles be lots of different colors so grab mesh emitter under color change this to random and grab ourselves another fun gradient I'll yank off the blues and purples this time and distribute so now that's going to spawn a bunch of different colors and you see they're going to explode by their individual colors so that's pretty fun right away we can inherit the color now we can also do things like inherit the radius as well so let's do something like let's say the mesh emitter can emit let's collapse that up we got the radius and I'll say the radius will be anywhere from three with a variation of let's just say of three so they can get pretty big let's hit play actually we have to go into the particle group and show the radius so we can hit play and you see okay a bunch of different radiuses that totally works so I want to inherit that radius as well so let's go into reproduce scroll down under properties to radius and again we can inherit those but I don't think I want it to take on all of that so let's just say like we can go above 100% I wonder if they could be like double the size of the original one they haven't tinkered with that but let's drop the radius to 50 % and we'll say that the default radius is one so it's going to try and be one but it's going to take on half of the property that it spawns from so bigger ones will emit bigger particles so let's hit play and now oh let's also make sure that those particles are showing their radius and you can see this bigger one is spawning bigger particles this tiny one spawn tiny little particles so we inheriting both the color and sum of the radius so reproduce really powerful as far as taking on the properties if these particles had a certain amount of Lifetime we could inherent the life but right now they live forever and then we've got the velocity we could be taking on the speed or taking on the direction of the particles right now they're static so that wouldn't do anything we can take on the rotation we could also take on the spin from them so we can essentially take on any property from the parent and put it into this reproduced particle having done all that we can start making things a little bit fancier using some of the things that we've learned so let's say these little particles they are going to learn live for a certain amount of time we already see they live for around 11 let's say we want the radius of our reproduced particles to shrink every single frame we can do that via a math so let's grab a math drop it inside the particle Group which is the reproduced ones and let's say we want to multiply the radius their current radius by 75 so that should make them shrink every single frame and honestly I think that's all we have to do but I think I want them to be a little bit bigger when they're when they're born so let's go and say that they're going to to inherit 100% of the original radius so now when you hit play these are going to burst and yeah you can now see those start shrinking they start out big and then as we go frame by frame they get tinier and they're going to shrink to essentially nothing and they all keep on popping away now we can get very fancy when it comes to reproducing particles and we are going to do more of that but I think we'll save some of the additional things for when we're doing some of the fun rig some of the more Project based ones like making some fireworks anyway with the reproduce under our belt let's jump into a new scene file and I'm going to create a simple pillar so we'll start out real simple make a cube make it a little bit smaller and what we're going to be aiming to use this time is the Collide so here's my plan let's make a basic emitter and scoot this back in space make it very small and yes constantly emit but I'm going to drop it down to something like 10 so you see we'll just get a little burst of particles every once in a while happening forever right clicking on that I'm going to add an animation vibrate tag and let's get some rotation going on here I don't want too much amplitude but I think we want a decent amount on XYZ so yeah we got some a lot of vertical rotation but let's slow this way down like 0. five you can see I've kind of got a bunch of bullets flying out from this thing constantly shooting let's give ourselves a bunch more frames and what we'd like to do is start colliding these particles against the wall so pretty simple let's write click on the cube say simulation collider and let's hit play but you'll see the particles are going to fly right through the object it's not colliding that's because we need this Collide modifier so we activate that drop it inside our particle group and by default we could exclude things but it's going to see everything and right now it's set to bounce 100% off the surface so let's see what happens let's also make the particles a little bit bigger for easier visibility so now you can see the part particles are bouncing right off the surface excellent perfect exactly what we wanted to happen perfect particles flying bouncing right off there boing boing boinging excellent so now let's go inside the Collide and take a look at the settings so we've got some options here we can collide with the object we can kill the particle so now when the particle collides it just dies by colliding which could be useful and then we've got repel so now we just have this bounce force and I think is our radius of some sort let's see let's hit play I'm not even sure what repel does I haven't played with it yeah maybe that yeah repel based on something intersection is not very powerful but if we give it a radius by changing that to radius I think we'll start seeing that is going to yeah you can see it's curving away so definitely repel works better with radius so that's kind of neat so yeah those are our three modes Collide kill and repel so now let's go back to our contact so when do we want to make contact I want to make contact when they intersect or we can set that based on a radius from the circle you can see right there they're bouncing straight off of it or you can do both where it's trying to check if they're intersecting or if they've gotten within a radius and then they just bounce straight off of it so yeah that's pretty straightforward then we've got our bounce like maybe we don't want them bouncing maybe they just strike the surface and they're not going to have too much energy coming off of there we've got Dynamic friction this isn't going to you're not going to see that very well here maybe if this was sliding along the ground but we're bouncing off a pillar so we'll deal with that later and then we've also got some variation that will go along well with the bounce where they'll get a bunch of variation in the way that they are ricocheting off of that surface so yeah very straightforward settings here but there is a cool little rig I want to show you so this one's a little bit more Project based but let's see how it goes you can see that there is something called a Target group here essentially this Collide can act as a condition but the only condition he can do is switching particles to another group so why don't we make an empty group I'm going to make a particle group and we'll just call this one cided so when the particles Collide they will swap to this collided group when they're in this collided group I want to make sure that I know that they did so let's swap their color so we can grab a color mapper and say hey change your color based on the age of whatever and drop this out so they'll turn red so let's see if they turn red when they strike the surface fire fire fire and they turn red let's make them a little bit bigger again so we can see them excellent so those now swap to a different group when that happens so now that they're in a different group we can give those all sorts of new behaviors like let's remove all the speed so I'm going to say when that strikes I want to use math after the color has been changed what I'd like to do is assign the velocity speed to zero so they should just stop dead when they hit the surface as soon as they swap the group so those are going to bounce change color and they just stick perfectly excellent exactly what I wanted to happen now I think what I'd like to do is is Let's Make A reproduce so and that's why I wanted to cover those reproduce before we did this I'm going to say let's make a reproduce we got a brand new group here move it down I might even grab the word reproduce and put it into re put particle group reproduce just so I'm not mixing those up so when do I want this to execute well I'm going to drop it inside of this collided and this is going to now apply to all of those always so I'm going to say yeah but per particle I want you to to do a big old burst of particles so we say like 22 particles and then kill the source so every single frame every single one of these collided particles is going to explode into a whole bunch of particles that seems like it would be dangerous but it's not going to be because every one of these is just getting turned into this type of particle for a second that the instant it gets turned it's going to change color stop dead and then reproduce and that will kill the particle so what we should get is a little burst of particles every time one of these strikes the wall so if I have play we should see that we get a nice little boop boop boop and oh we're getting these particles but they're flying through the wall so I should change my reproduce the direction to be random I want it to be in all directions and I think we could probably tell that also to be colliding so let's drop a Collide inside of our reproduce as well and see if those actually Bounce Off the Wall so we hit play now we'll hit these particles and oh we're getting a giant explosion of them so why are we getting an explosion of particles I paused very quickly because that could be dangerous so the reproduce is supposed to kill the particle from The Source it is creating 22 particles and we are limited to the collided particle so if that is killing the particle then why is it continuing to make them oh I know why that's happening it's happening because these new particles are colliding with the wall and being told to go into the collided group so I'm going to click on the Collide and stop them from changing the group okay good inside that reproduce we should probably limit their lifetime so I'll say that they only live for let's say seven frames very quick so now we'll try that again and now we get the bullets to fly out and the bullets will now strike the wall boom there's a little burst of particles and everything is fine we just get that lovely little burst but I don't want the reproduce to actually kill the particle so let's turn off kill source and you'll see that it's going to only emit these particles one time so that's excellent that means I can hit play and these will shoot out and they will strike the wall they will convert to a red particle and they'll give a single burst of kind of these fra ments going so we're going to get this continuous string of red particles wherever it was struck so I think we can do something pretty fun with that so I'm going to save this scene file and instead of this surface here being this singular block why don't we turn it into a more complicated mesh so here's my thought let's feed that collider into a volume Builder and then feed that into a volume mesh I'll hit NB so I can actually see the subdivisions and I want there to be more detail than that so in my volume Builder I'll drop it to five maybe a little bit more we'll say three I want to keep it not overly detailed so it doesn't take too long to run excellent so that's working well now let's move the collider up to the volume mesh that's what it's actually colliding with now everything we just did should be working fine if I hit play the particles should still Collide off of it exactly as we were just seeing and everything's behaving the exact same way because that is the collider but here's my thought every time we make a red part iCal I want to take a little bite out of this pillar how do we do that well we've got this volume Builder let's drag in the end result of the particle striking it which is collided into the volume Builder now do not drag the particle in as a child because if you turn off the volume Builder and measure it'll stop calculating that group so instead just Remote Link into it drag it directly in like this now you'll see that immediately it is acknowledging those particles and is making them as a little bump on the outside so right away that's pretty cool we could in Theory start stacking up a bunch of these particles if I hit play let's just see what happens I'm going to let this continue you see we get a bump and a bump and a bump but every time a new bump is created that is a new bit of surface and that new Surface can be collided with by a particle so we can get a bunch of buildup on top of here so that could be pretty cool but I think I want the opposite effect I want this to be subtractive so instead of the collided being a union I'm going to say the collided is subtracting from the surface and we can set the exact radius it could also be based off the particle size which could be pretty cool let's just see how the size of this is so when a bullet comes flying out then hopefully we're going to see that it's a little bit slower even on my viewport to calculate when that goes and Strikes the surface it's going to create a little sphere and that is a bite out of the surface so let's zoom on up on that so now you can see there's a divot in there it's updated the geometry now these red particles we wouldn't render those we could just have those little bits of fragment come out and that would be damaged from wall so now if I let this continue we're going to keep on shooting more and more bullets and the bullets are doing damage to the pillar once there's a hole a new particle can strike that geometry and make an even deeper hole now we're going to keep getting a bigger and bigger pile of these red particles and they'll just live there forever constantly subtracting more and more and as we fire more of more bullets into this pillar it's just going to get more and more damage so immediately this starts making you think of like the first Matrix movie where we can just keep doing more and more damage to this pillar now there's a lot of polygons on there and while recording whatnot this running slower than some of my tests had gone but this effect is very cool we could definitely increase the geometry to have this be more detailed I can fire more bullets out to have those go faster we can make more fragments be flying out everything could have gravity getting applied to it oh look we finally blasted a hole through the pillar entirely so blasted right on through and now every subsequent bullet that hits that spot is going to fly right through it so very fun way of using the reproduce and of being able to take bites out of geometry and constantly update the Collision since we're already here why don't we make it look a little bit better by adding a little bit of geometry in here so when that burst of particles comes out I think that we should probably have some gravity applied there so let's add a gravity and this gravity will apply to not collided but to the resulting explosion that comes from there so I'll drop that under the Collide so hopefully these little pink particles and actually let's change the color of those just so we can see them better let's make those a bright yellow and I'll increase the radius so we can see them better so these little yellow particles are going to burst and now they've got gravity applied now maybe we make that gravity a little bit weaker but let's see we get the first Collision get a little indent and yeah we get that burst of particles and they fall down now maybe we want to give them a little bit of time before they fall away but I think that works pretty well and let's create a I I think actually we want to shrink those and you can do something pretty cool to shrink them let's show their radius and inside of the particle you can see that is their current radius of one and I want them to keep on shrinking more and more as they get older now we have limited their life the reproduce they're only going to live for seven frames let's have them live for eight frames with four frames of variation so as short as four as much as 12 so they have every particle has its own lifetime that they can live so if we were to make a thata mapper drop that inside of that reproduce I'm going to say I want to take your age not age actually but your age percentage from zero and remap it from Z to 100% to what well I want to remap that to the radius so I'm going to say when your age is zero so when you're brand new your radius will be one and then when you're at the end when you're at the end of your life at 100% your radius will be zero so they kind of shrink into nothingness they'll just kind of visually disappear and let's make sure this line is linear so they don't they don't grow and then shrink again so spline preset linear straight line going across and let's see what happens hit play from scratch and let's take a look at those yellow particles and see if they get smaller as they get older so we get a burst of particles boom and then they start falling and as they fall they get smaller and smaller and smaller based on their age so the ones that are bigger are going to live for a little bit longer and then more burst will come in so okay excellent that's working very nicely now let's make a cloner and the cloner will be set to OB object mode the object will be this particle group reproduce we could even rename that to be like I don't know like chips or something the chips coming out from this pillar and in the cloner I'll drag that in I want to take on the particle scale so yes please and let's just feed in some geometry so I mean we can keep it fast and simple just make a cube set the size to 11 one actually if the radius is one does that match or not I mean it's fine we can make a little bit bigger but you see we get these little cubes now the cubes are taking on the rotation they're taking on the color they're taking on the scale so all that is working very nicely we could now say hey don't worry about drawing the radius because we actually see it via the cubes we're going to get these little bursts and explosions of the actual geometry falling away so exactly what I want and in this case I could probably even visually hide these particles and if we were to render this remember tell them not to render as well so now we don't even see the particles we just see the actual cubes bursting away from the wall so excellent now those could be taking on the color those could even be potentially taking on the color of the wall based on the vertex map there's a lot of things we could be doing but that's working well we got the holes getting dug in we could put a bullet in there but you can see how we could start layering these things up and that's where it gets really exciting and making a more complicated model here I think is totally possible but I'll have to wait until I get my new machine to do something like that so that is the Collide moving into another new scene file we've got pyro advec here's one of my practice files and and again it's not going to be super quick but I'm now using a burst of pyro coming out from this plane you see I made a bunch of particles here and they got tiny little tracers on them and I actually visually hid a bunch of the Pyro and all I did was make a lovely simple pyro adve and it's taking on the forces of the Pyro Cloud passing through it you can see that's creating this great swirl traveling through so very simple to implement just like the Collide you just create the Pyro adve you drop it inside your particle group and it will now respect the fire that's being created this one's running a little bit faster because I think I I must have turned off like tons of the settings in pyro as far as not showing pretty much anything but yeah you can see you get really cool like liquidy swirls from that so very fun and I look forward to playing with that more when I can get a better uh frame rate on it let's move on to stick in a new scene file I will start with creating a sphere nice and simple right clicking on that I'll add an animation TCH vibrate and I want to affect the position so we'll say about 100 is good so change those numbers and I'll slow it down significantly let's say 0.5 and I'd like this to spin a bunch so I'll set it to 720 and put that in all three rotations and drop the frequency way down so if IIT play I've got a sphere that's moving around and it's spinning all over the place now let's create an emitter with a bunch of different colors because we'll be able to see it better so in this case it' be kind of fun to make let's keep it simple I'll make a basic emitter and do my favorite Circle rotate that to be pointing upward move it way down and in this case let's say that it's going to yeah constantly emit particles we can give them varying speeds if we like so let's say up to 55 different the direction is fine under color we'll set that to random and load to preset and let's get the full rainbow because why not hit play and now we're going to get a bunch of particles let's make them bigger so we can see them a little bit nicer and we got particles all flying up doing their thing okay we need more frames and we need to add a c lier tag to our sphere so simulation collider what do we need to actually make the stick well we just need the stick modifier drop that under particle group and now as this runs the particles are going to strike the sphere and they're going to stick now earlier in this video hours ago at this point we were talking about colliders and the connectors and where a fixed connector was kind of like loose but if you look these particles are sticking perfectly to the surface it's so good look at them just perfect coating this thing so yeah we could cover this whole thing in like candy if we want to it's just moving around with this piece of geometry so very pleased with that now there are a bunch of settings here I mean it's actually one of the more straightforward ones but you can see that we've got a radius so we could be saying that these are striking from a much greater distance if we continue this you'll see these new ones are going to be sticking from further away actually that's not even true I think that they instantly stick to the surface it's just the distance in which they've detected the object and then they suddenly snap to it so you could make a smaller radius but they always look like they're sticking perfectly to that surface next up is kind of a strange one and that is we can lower the strength down so let's start this over again and say that these are only sticking 10% to the surface if I hit play now these particles are going to go up and you see they are going to stick but look at them be all kind of Wiggly wobbly on top of the sphere like look how funky that is how would I'm not even sure how I would make an animation that was doing something like that and keep in mind we could always hide the original sphere so we get this this kind of weird blob taking on the shape as the different bits stick on there so that's pretty fun by itself now all of these particles are getting the condition of being stuck and they will I think forever be stuck even if I turn off the stick you're going to see that those are still stuck to it they are they've been told okay you're stuck you're stuck to this object so how do we unstick them well we have to make a different condition to make an unstick we can also do a different condition to change the strength right now they're very Loosely connected but we could change the strength to be very strongly connected so in this case why don't we make a slightly fancier condition than we've been doing in the past I'm going to make a Time condition drop it under our particle group and say uh if the time is less than or equal to and let's give it a little bit time to collect some particles so we'll say like 222 so that is when these are going to stick but now if I make another condition I can drop this as a child of this condition you can actually make you can layer and layer and layer conditions on top of each other so right now this means if particle group and this time condition is met and this condition is met do whatever the child is so and you can keep on layering more and more and more and you see right now they're combining with an and but on this new condition I'm going to say don't combine with an and instead you are the inverse and you see all the other properties went away and all this is now doing is saying with this condition isn't met anymore this one starts getting met so that means I can duplicate my stick and say unstick at that time so as soon as we swapped from the time of 222 we are now above it and which means we will unstick from it so I'll rename this to unstick just so it's nice and clear so now let's run that again from scratch bunch of particles flying up as they strike the surface they are sticking and they're going to stick until right around 222 and right at that moment suddenly it lets go of everything they go flinging away and nothing else is going to connect to that surface so we have the ability to change how sticky they are let's try changing the sticky this actually I'll say stick 100% on there and let's run that again I've actually never done a change strength so I'm just curious what it looks like so right now they are all Wiggly again and sticks stick sticks and then suddenly boom you see they all just got stuck directly to the surface so yeah very different behaviors now of course we can do things like let's go back to the original we don't need to unstick them now right now we're sticking to them we can change the radius so that will make them stick from further away of course it snaps right to the surface and every time they get stuck we could have them change to a different group so just like when we collided we could change a group when they stick we could change them to a different group so suddenly they could be in a brand new group that's uh changing their radius or something like that and of course we got some pretty straightforward settings as far as including or excluding certain colliders so right now we're colliding with that sphere and we could say well there's two spheres ignore one of them include the other so that should work pretty well and we could also click this button that's going to jump to the objects that it is actually colliding with so pretty straightforward but that is the stick modify fire and we're down to only one more let's close down all these files now for the last of our four collision-based modifiers this effect is going to be sort of like putting a car in a wind tunnel but in order to keep the frame rate as high as I can we're going to keep it nice and simple with a sphere and on the sphere we'll put a simulation cider and then I need a emitter basic emitter here scoot it back on Z and I think I want a a tall thin sliver of particles so I make this nice and tall and on X I'll put zero so if I hit play we're going to get a constant stream of particles shooting forward so in the particle group we'll make them bigger and I like changing them to have lots of different colors just because it's easier to tell what each particle is doing so I'll say random and set that to my gradient all right cool lots of different random colors and you know what just to see it even better let's grab our particle group click the Tracer and say a limit from end 22 and now we can get some little taals so we can see exactly what they're doing now a lot of this effect we're going to be doing from the side view so if I middle Mouse button click I can go to the side view and we see all these particles flying straight across this time we are using surface attract and I have to say of all these different modifiers this is the one I find least intuitive just personally it feels a little bit more art than science so let's just play around and see what we can get it to do because it does some pretty cool things so let's drop it inside our particle group and go to surf surf attract and you can see it's already looking for a simulation tag so it's already seeing the sphere so if we were to just hit play right now let's see what happens so you got a bunch of particles floating forward and as they approach the sphere you suddenly see they start taking on sort of the surface orientation they start traveling around it Go ourselves a few extra frames you see these travel around and they'll even sort of start continuing around the entire thing now first thing I want to do is make sure that we are not traveling off axis you see these are flying off thanks to the surface so we'll prevent that with a map drop that inside and we are going to assign on position X already zero constantly so it's going to be a flat plane so let's run that again and we'll see that those X's are now no longer escaping and that's the last thing that's happening okay now that that's happening go back to our side view and now we don't have any of those crazy ones drifting around and you'll see we get that nice whipping around of this object in our surface attract we can go and increase our radius so it's a little bit further perhaps from the sphere and now you can definitely see them start to travel around the entire thing so some these go down and now they want to continue traveling around which is a neat effect but if we want to do sort of a wind tunnel effect that's not quite what I'm expecting and you know maybe it's not fair to expect it to do that automatically now there's a couple other settings we have attract and land but we'll get to those in the moment we've got the radius and already you can see as we increase the radius the effect will be applied from further and then we've got strength now strength can be interesting in this context if we start lowering the strength you're going to see actually we'll start it again as these drift in that they are going to get affected but not quite as much and now they are able to kind of pass around the back a little bit better so maybe maybe that's the key to the effect that I want to do here I will increase the radius even further so maybe they start drifting away from the surface here the Leading Edge a little bit more and now what's interesting here I'm not quite sure what to make of it is that some of these particles will travel downward even though they're above or I think that the surface that they'd be closest to would want them to go upward not downward now if we turn on randomize that seems to really crank up the number of them that will travel down rather than up so a lot more chaos when they decide which direction they're going but I'm not quite sure why some of them decide to travel downward so just a question mark I've got there so these are traveling around pretty well I'm pleased with the way those are looking now overall now an effect I have found that increases the way the quality of this effect actually is instead of having these all just travel via their built-in velocity what if we start draining out their velocity via a friction so we'll drop that before the math I'll say math dox just to know that that's flattening that whole thing so with a little bit of friction here you see they're constantly losing their speed and slowing down so that's fine now I want to give them back their speed with a wind it's already blowing in the right direction so we'll set that up to something like 55 is that good I might want to go faster let's even go up to about 100 so now we've got all those traveling forward now and what's happening now is instead of them just having their own velocity there's a wind that's always telling them to try and go further backward you see we get a little bit better curvature on the back here and the energy is constantly being drained out but the wind is telling it to go backwards again so I feel like the wind tunnel effect a little bit better and honestly more accurate because now there is a wind constantly blowing everything backward now potentially we could do fall-offs where we say that the wind is going to be a lot stronger back here but personally I think I found a pretty cool trick where we can use a blend if I use this blend one of the settings one of the properties is velocity and that's just the Direction it's moving like all of its motion so if we give that a relatively large radius and a strength of 50% I found is pretty good as they start traveling they are adapting the direction that each of them are traveling like their overall movement that might confuse a little bit in the beginning so we might want to modify that but now as they travel backward as this group from the bottom and the group from the top start approaching each other they're going to blend into each other and we get a lot more of this leveled out movement where they're not fighting each other as much and immediately they take on that direction again so there are things we could do condition wise I'm not sure how old these particles get but potentially actually we can probably do a position right now these particles are being born back on negative Z so if we make a condition one we haven't used yet we'll say condition and the condition is for this blending and I want the wind before the friction and then we want the blend in the condition so the condition is going to be when the position of Z equals equals or I'm going to say greater than or equals zero so right there is the threshold for zero to be positive so these aren't going to start trying to blend until these particles have gone beyond that point so I've never tried this before but let's see how that works hitting play let me deselect so the condition is not highlighting them or delighting them perhaps now we can see that those are not being forced to blend together and now those will blend and hopefully it'll be pretty smooth and as these travel around to the back now oh yeah look at that nice transitions oh okay this is the best version of this I've ever gotten so I like the way that that's looking now potentially we could use some sort of different attractors or we could use some forces to push these away from the surface a little bit but from a 3D point of view I think that these would just kind of do a nice job of traveling around the entire thing especially if we hid the original particles and we're just looking at those tracers like that's doing a pretty nice job of giving a flow around the entire object so I'm pleased with that so keep that in mind in fact this is a really good version so I will save this one because it's working better than any of the other ones I've gotten to work now let's take a look at some of the other settings that we have inside of the surface attract now we do have the radius we've got strength we also have damping so this would essentially add some additional friction for the particles that are getting close to the surface so essentially you'll slow down when you're near that surface so potentially that is a useful one we already saw that randomized seem to send more particles up or down the opposite of what you would intuitively think they are and then we've got a straightforward apply object velocity so if this sphere was moving those particles would take on its movement and probably rotation now as soon as something gets within this radius we can have something change its Target Group which is pretty powerful just being able to have that simple radius around an object that might be a cool way of building a condition based on just being in the radius and get rid of all the strength so keep that in mind for the future for changing groups the ability to change a group essentially is a super condition that you can do anything with from that point forward and of course we can in exclude any other any simp imation objects if we hit select geometry then it will select anything that is currently in the scene that it is affecting now let's look at our other modes as well so right now that is our follow the surface but let's change this to be an attract so we still get that large radius and I'll crank up our strength to be really high and let's see what we get now so if I hit play keep in mind that we've got kind of a modified scene here that the wind is constantly blowing to the back so that's going to change things but what I found is I don't find attract very intuitive let's go and turn off wind and the friction so we're still stopping on Z and let's just look at the way this behaves what this is supposed to do is attract to kind of the nearest point of the surface so you see they start curving down towards the surface but then they kind of start whipping back up again and maybe that makes sense where they've kind of passed through and the next maybe they're looking forward and that's the next most forward point so they kind of drift upward but I don't have a great intuition for that one but if you start adding some damping in there actually as soon as we hit kind of a threshold you're going to see we have very different effect where everything starts slowing down and then drifting towards the surface so depending on that level of damping that could actually give you some pretty cool effects where it's going to try and get attracted directly to the surface a very different effect but pretty neat now that might work in combination with land but land is the one I find maybe least intuitive if I activate land you're going to see that actually 100% it's gonna be weird because suddenly the particles are G get snapped straight to the surface as soon as they're within the radius they're finding the nearest possible surface and just snapping straight to it but if we lower our strength down really weak let's say like 5% we still get sort of a weird effect it is going to move within radius but as soon as it's in the radius you see we suddenly get this hard change of Direction where they're just stopping moving towards the direction and moving straight towards the surface so potentially that could be fine that could work but that sharp change in direction is what's throwing me off now I wonder I'm going to take this blend out of there and I wonder if that could actually smooth those out no the blend is not strong enough to counteract this uh surface ATT trct just blatantly changing their Direction so again a kind of a cool effect but that straight change there instead of there being some sort of transition again throws me off a bit we can put some damping on there but that doesn't change that horse transition they will lose our energy as they get near the surface and you know again a pretty cool effect you can see the way those look and I I did think I found that if we have a small radius if we keep on slowly increasing our radius you kind of get this cool stair Steppy effect where more and more particles are going to be attempting to change their Direction and get attracted to the surface maybe I want that to be a little bit stronger there so yeah those are getting pulled towards the surface now oh I clicked on the trct apologies so yeah if we drop the stair Steppy effect down and we keep on increasing that radius we can kind of get these cool effects where you get like these waves of them traveling in so I think there's a lot of cool effects here but yeah I I find I just play around with the sliders until I get something that that looks cool where the other ones I feel like I really understand them so yeah this one definitely worth a lot more exploring I think there's a lot more possibilities for what it can do but the ability to take on some of the surface properties is another you know great tool in this tool belt let's close down this file and move into a brand new one because there are sort of a couple global settings I think that we should talk about the first thing is under simulate we've got our simulation scene so if you were to make like a basic emitter and drop that inside of that simulation scene instead of using these Global parameters under say particles it's going to use these local ones in the simulation scene and that means I could make a duplicate of that make a completely separate particle system over here and these two scenes these simulation scenes won't interact with each other so you can always do that and change local settings so keep that in mind I just don't do it very often because almost always I want all my particles to interact in addition to that let's go to those global settings under simulation you go specifically to particles and you'll see substeps although I've got a little demo I'm going to show you that will demonstrate that even better but you can make the particles have even more calculations by doing substeps on them change your Precision from 16 and 32 and then we've got these two settings called initial capacity and compactify threshold so very weird terms but essentially what this is saying is you've got a certain capacity of particles and it's keeping all of those particles in memory inside of Cinema inside of that simulation engine so what this is saying if you have more than 20% of your particles are essentially dead it's going to try and recycle those so essentially it'll store extra particles in your scene that you don't need because the deletion of those particles is a pretty like major calculation hit so very technical terms but that's erasing out un needed particles and potentially you might want your compactify to be happening constantly refresh and delete them or you might want to say hey never compactify you want to keep all those particles so I haven't run into that yet but something to keep in mind we got selection highlighting so you can stop anything from highlighting and finally you got grouplist particles so if you have a grouplist particle it's going to display as this crazy pink color man I'm starting to lose my voice after all of this recording now let's create any one of these emitters and now we have our particle group and you'll see inside your particle group you have a cache so we can actually cash these particles we can cach them we can actually cash them to a limic or we can cach them internally in the scene and after we've cached them you see that we can actually do things like use animation do offsets or change of speed or we can do some time remapping which is great and really powerful couple things to note as I mentioned a long time ago this particle system has a separate simulation engine sort of running separately from regular Cinema and the viewport so what that means is you do end up with certain limitations where for instance you cannot render to your viewport you can't do let me actually correct myself you can't render to the viewport renderer unless you've baked your particles because the simulation is kind of happening in that separate engine before it comes back so once you bake it it's fully here within Cinema so definitely something to keep in mind always keep in mind that we've got these particles and once they're baked you can do some cool things at the point that they're baked maybe I can open up a seam file or even do something really straightforward here where if we make some particles yeah we've already got a mitter let's aim this upward and we can just shoot some particles up into the air and yeah actually they're doing their thing just fine so I'm just going to leave that like that so let's bake this scene so let's say cat the scene so he wants me to save this somewhere this is fine say save oh I guess I give it a name terrible name I say test and now that's baking out my simulation and now that that's baked out I am able to see that that is indeed cached we're ready to go it is actually I guess just a straight up Olympic cache which is kind of interesting but now that it is baked we've got these particles but what's cool is we can do things like make a deformer we can make a twist deformer and drop it as a child and start increasing this and you can see I can actually twist those particles around so if I were to grab the end result of that put a tracer on there and say start tracing that we're actually going to get a twisting effect so once it's baked we're able to do things like deformers on top of it now you don't necessarily need to or want to use the baking process here I can clear out that cache and we can run the simulation but but that same deformation this twist is not going to apply on top of it where as I increase this twist you see those particles did not move but we do have still some Alternatives where we could maybe do something like create a matrix object tell the Matrix to clone onto an object the object will be the particle group so now I've got all those Matrix clones so with those Matrix clones now existing I can deform those Matrix objects so this time I didn't cache but I'm able to grab a Twist drop that inside The Matrix twist those around and you see those are now twisting and say okay Matrix I want you to have a tracer attached and those will get twisted so now when I hit play we're still getting that twisting effect keep in mind that that deformed part is now it's kind of like when you run a dynamic simulation on top of particles like the simulation kind of becomes a separate thing it's like yeah they Spawn from the same spot and they have the same Lifetime and color but they're not in the same place anymore so yeah these are no longer in that same place so just a couple of important details there so those are some global settings what I would like to do is go through a couple of my project files we are not going to rebuild these although during live streams these are great examples of things that we could Tinker around with now one thing I suggest everybody does when you're playing with any new particle system in any software that is try and make a fireworks explosion like make a big old fireworks celebration and it's a good way of just kind of stretching the muscles of that tool so here you can see I've got all these particles flying in the air exploding burst we got these Trails we got these swirls coming below it was really fun to put this together and these will just go forever with random colors so this did a lot to teach me how to spawn these reproduce these children particles and how to inherit the color and all these different variables and look at how simple this hierarchy is we've got the initial burst of particles which are living for a certain amount of time and generating a certain color and I actually have them spinning around a random degree and those particles spinning around is what enables me to spin out a bunch of particles as these swirling Tails let's rewind to clean it up a little bit and then we've got the initial particle that's going to travel up and eventually explode that's this burst so it makes a burst of particles and those particles are then also reproducing thanks to these burst tails and those are leaving those little Trails behind and every single one of these have settings where they are doing things like inheriting the color of it 69% of the color of that burst particle is being put into the tail and if we go back up to the burst you see 100% of the color of the initial firework is getting transferred over to the burst so yeah a lot of fun things you can do I'm using a lot of uh data mappers here where I'm remapping the radius based on the age I'm remapping the color Alpha channel so these Fade Out this entire thing was set up to render actually let me see if I can pop open that render so here it is here's the fireworks it's not the highest resolution but this rendered pretty quick all in red shift so you can see bursting effects lots of Bloom and flares and whatnot so a fun one to put together definitely recommend everybody Tinkers around with some fireworks at some point moving on this one is very exciting I I wish we had more time to go over it but this is mostly just using flocking and Collide you can see I made a bunch of these steps and the flocking is telling the particles to push apart from each other so if I hit play right now it's going to make a burst of particles they all spread out and this is making a very simple liquid effect where the particles want to hang out near each other but they want to also push a park from each other and gravity is making them flow down through here and you see we get this nice flowy kind of oozing motion now one thing to point out is there's so many particles stacking on top of each other these are getting really squished in there but if you go into your global settings and I change my substeps up to one just changing one number there watch this cluster right here when I hit play again there's suddenly going to be kind of a burst as those push their way back out again and that is now a lot cleaner they're not squishing s nearly as much they are still squished a little bit so I have found if you go up to three then they're going to push out again and at three it doesn't really feel like there's much compression going on anymore now they are pretty accurate and they don't feel like they're getting squished in there too much you get all this really fun flowing action now again you see this is two-dimensional and I definitely recommend when you're playing around whenever you can do things two-dimensionally it just removes a big variable and instead of making a giant liquid s I can just do this little crosssection of it and get way quicker testing so another fun thing to do much like that cartoon explosion you saw earlier here let me turn that off update my red shift if I hit play we get a burst of particles and a long tail of particles all being fed through a volume measure and what we end up with here let this go you get this cartoony tail and the flocking is letting these cluster up in these little blobs so you get these nice little anime smoke effects going on so very fun you don't have to do too much a little turbulence a little bit of flocking and you can get effects like this so we can break that down more during a live stream moving on here's just some fun oh yeah this is definitely one I I want to mention very simple setup stuff that we've seen before but this time I've got this plane highly subdivided and in that plane I've got a Vertex color map and you can drag the particle group into a Vertex map and you can actually extract the colors so if I hit play right now you're can see I get all of these crazy colors going and here they are represented in my vertex map if I then activate this Decay it's going to draw a little tail behind them so it's a way of translating those particles directly onto a mesh via the vertex color map so yeah very fun along those lines next up here is actually this is an old tutorial I made way back in the day actually no that's not um I want to explore this one a little bit more in the future it's not quite working but I like this effect where I got these little taals traveling and it's drawing these little radiuses of different spheres behind it depending on what the distance traveled was but eventually this breaks down I start getting these like super wacky Giant on so I got to like figure out what's going wrong with there but I really like the effect overall uh next up here was actually my earlier kind of like teaching myself what the surface ATT trct was doing here it is traveling over a car now it's not actually viewing the mesh of the car it's viewing this remesh I made so a nice little poly version of it but this one's not working as well as the one we just made but you get some nice smooth Trails behind it so pretty cool you see how it works on a car next up here is some field forces now actually this is one I'd love to talk about maybe we can save this one for the live stream if I hit play we can get these cool twisting effects traveling around now technically you could actually do this effect with the old particle system but it's so much better and more fun to use in the new system so yeah we should definitely go and explore that one next up we've got which one is this oh this one's going to run really slow but what I'm doing is making some growing vertex Maps so I got this vertex map we we got some curves and eventually there's going to be some growing effects traveling on here yeah here's the freeze set to grow so it's going to grow this vertex map over the entire surface and as it's growing this poly effect is dissolving out the polygons and I'm able to emit particles from only where the vertex Maps were so we get this cool burning rainbow effect traveling along the surface and eventually the entire thing will dissolve but you see even here in my viewport this one's not running terribly well so you know new computer all the way but yeah pretty cool effect and the polygons are dissolving behind it sort of invisibly behind all of these so yeah very cool effect and I look forward to exploring that some more and we got two little ones to go we've got these tail guides so let's see what I get oh okay so this one is a really old effect I made oh no that this isn't what I thought it was okay this one is weird I need to explore this more it's kind of weird where I'm emitting a burst of particles and I've got these tracers coming behind it but then I'm using some really strong field forces to tell it to follow those and what I do is I do a giant burst of particles and those particles via a field Force want to follow where these guide spines are going so you can see you get this organic blob where things want to Branch out and travel along and doing some fun vertex map magic I can get these colorful blobs all kind of transitioning so like a nice bright colorful mesh flowing in all these directions completely organic like I don't know what direction that's going to go so yeah pretty fun there I want to explore it some more and finally using some of the flocking behaviors this is just a big ball a burst of particles and a volume measure and as they continue to go further and further out eventually the flocking is attracting a whole bunch of the particles to each other and we kind of get this nuclear explosion effect where as it gets bigger and bigger you start getting these little holes forming in it and the holes will spread further and further out until finally everything kind of coalesces in these little ropey shapes so yeah this looks like the the exploding top of the mushroom cloud so pretty cool effect to be able to recreate pretty easily here with a new particle system now I feel like we could keep on going and going and going for hours and I'm worried that this video is already I'm not exaggerating I'm worried this video might be four hours long I might have to break into multiple Parts but you'll know by the time you've seen this I don't right now as I record it so I think I am finally going to have to wrap this one up a huge thank you to everybody who has made it to the end of the video whether you were skipping around or watched all four hours straight through thank you so much for watching if you like this video and this content be sure to support it by liking maybe subscribing whatever you want to do that's always appreciated and of course I have a patreon setup to support being able to make these videos I have spent the better part of a month learning and preparing for this video so it does eat up a lot of my time now uh as I mentioned there's a new rocket lasso sale going on right now during NAB you get 25% off any of our tools so always great to go and check that out make sure to check out EJ's video to see all the new red shift stuff obviously I couldn't make this video even longer at four hours it's almost double any of my other tutorials so absolutely crazy along those lines and yeah I think that's going to wrap it up be sure to check out the live stream today if you're watching this video and it's brand new I guess you'd probably have to skip out of the video because it's too long so you wouldn't see this part before the live stream but again thank you so much everybody for tuning in it's always very appreciated and I'll see you during the live stream bye-bye [Music] everybody [Music] [Music] n [Music] [Music]

Channel: RocketLasso

Views: 43,721

Keywords: Rocket Lasso Live, Chris Schmidt, Cinema 4D tutorial, cinema 4d motion graphics, cinema 4d motion graphics tutorial beginner, cinema 4d questions, cinema 4d advanced tutorials, Maxon, Simulations 3D, Pyro, Fire, Smoke, Explosions, explode, Cinema 4d Connectors, C4d Particles, New C4D Particles, New Cinema 4D Particles System

Id: S6Oq4Xnc-AU

Length: 247min 28sec (14848 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024