X-Particles Tutorial - Fluid S (Free Project)

hi this is Jesper from the loss of the peak and in today's X particles tutorial we're gonna make this so it's this s and with a liquid inside of it and it has a speed ramp as well now if you want to follow along all the project files are available on velocity peak and calm all right let's jump in okay so let's build it now I have a timeline of a hundred and 80 frames already set up and I have have a few elements that I prepared that we can use later on for for rendering but the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna add the geometry so let's go to the splines menu and add a text spline and I'm gonna type in s and the inspiration here is 36 days of type and I figured I could get at least one letter in this time so s will be it now I'm gonna change the font to Museo sense rounded a thousand I really like this font because of the rounding on all the edges here looks really nice if you don't have this just use something that that looks good to you I prefer to have the alignment in the middle and I'm gonna try to match my original sample as closely closely as possible so that's good let's extrude this hold down alt or option and add it to an extrude object and I'm gonna extrude it 60 like so we're gonna add a glass material to this later on and because of that I want to make sure we have some actual thickness and that we can do that by adding it to a cloth surface so let's hold down alt or option again and add it to a cloth surface and there it looks a little bad here on the sides and in fact if I display the lines quick shading lines you can see that it really breaks it looks pretty horrific but let's see how we can fix it well first of all in the cloth surface we don't need any subdivisions we only need thickness but let's increase the thickness to 8 and how it looks bad again but we'll fix it let's go to the extrude object and the first thing let me just like caps only I'm gonna get a size a bevel size of 8 it's gonna make it nice and round and I'm gonna change the caps type from n-gon to the new option new from cinema 4d r21 Delauney and that makes it look quite good now what you want to be careful with when you use the cloth and thicken things up is that you may get some pinching it looks pretty ok but especially in these type of sharp curves like this you can get some pinching I'm gonna go to my text spline and instead of adaptive I'm gonna set this to uniform which is gonna fix that so for the number here the higher you go the smooth is gonna become but I'm gonna keep it at 8 it's pretty good compromise between smooth and not too many segments so I think that looks good let's keep it at this and I don't need to see their lines anymore so let's go to quick shading and I'm gonna turn off the cloth for now and bring it back later on when we render now one thing that we're gonna do is that we're gonna add an object to the bottom part of this s that we're gonna admit from so I want to be able to see through this ass so let's go to the extrude tab right click and do render tags and then display and we want to take the use and let's set it to lines so now we can see through this s now another thing that I need is a spline that's gonna be right in the middle of this s and the particles are gonna flow along this spline later on so we need to draw that so I'm gonna hit f4 for the front view and let's get the spline tool let's play a spline pen tool and let's just drag or a drag or draw a spline and to the best of my ability here doesn't have to be perfect like that here something like so in this area something like that my hit escape I'll get my move tool and perhaps fix this one I got a select the spline first and then maybe extend this a little bit but it doesn't have to be perfect so I'm gonna be happy with this let me get to object mode I want to move the entire spline right now this is in right Neph in the front of this s so we can see this a little better if we go to f5 so we can see all four views I'm gonna drag this to the center of this s and I know it's 60 centimeters deep so we can set the Z to 30 and now it's right in the middle let's go back to f1 the perspective view and now let's add the object we're gonna emit from which is gonna be a torus and it's coming in too big I'm gonna reduce this size to 24 or the Ring radius and then pipe radios I'm gonna do 8 and may bring back my 4 views again because I want to put this in the middle and let's pull this over here and up I want to rotate this one I can go back to my perspective you are for rotation and I rotate this move it close to this edge and I want to go to close because I'm gonna add a vibrate tag to this later so just close enough I think that's good so I want to have some movement on this torus so let's add a vibrate tag let's right-click on the torus and go to animation tags and vibrate now I'm gonna enable rotation and I'm gonna do 30 30 30 and not so fast so 0.5 for for the frequency let's see what that does so that looks pretty good so now on top of this I want to add a texture to the torus and we're gonna use the texture to omit to emit particles from and we're also gonna get the color from this texture so we can double-click in the materials manager to create a just a standard cinema 4d material put that on the torus and I'm gonna call this one emitter Matt for material and let's double click this let me pull this guy over I'm gonna use two different channels for this I'm gonna turn off reflectance and I'm gonna turn off color for now and start with luminance and I'm gonna define the colors in the luminance so in the luminance I'm gonna go to the drop down here and add a noise now let's go into the noise and I'm gonna bring up the size of this noise to begin with 563 and let's zoom in so we can see a little better and the first thing I'm gonna do is actually bring up the contrast now so there's gonna be one color for the white and one for the black and let's set that right away so the black I'm gonna turn into a purple color something like that and then the white one is gonna be an orange like that I think that's good so now you can define how much of each color by adjusting these contrast sliders I'm gonna set this to a five and then pull this one in a little bit maybe something like so I think that's pretty good so that defines the look we can also change the seed until we get something that we like and I'm going to do 671 so those are the colors now let's turn off the luminance and go into the color channel and let's add a noise to this one as well and now let's go into the noise now I am gonna change this noise from a standard noise to a hawk so which have these little nice dots but I don't need to have this many octaves I want to have a much simpler noise so we can do that by reducing the octaves to 2 and I'm gonna increase the scale to 581 so it's much bigger and let's also go to the contest and get that right up to a hundred now all the white almost disappeared now the way this works is that we are gonna be admitting from the white areas and the black areas are not gonna admit so I'm gonna get some more white in so I'm gonna bring this down to around 50 like so so now we're gonna be emitting from these white areas but I don't want them to have the same pattern on each frame so we're gonna animate the speed here if I go to the animation speed I can set this down to two or set this up to two I should say and I want to see what it looks like on the torus if I play it now we're not gonna see anything but if I go to editor and say animate preview and enable that you can now see the animation so wherever we have any white areas is where we're gonna be emitting particles from and that's going to leave the black alone and it's gonna make the colors from the luminance channel now I'm also gonna do one more thing in the torus we can affect the projection it's gonna change the display of the noise here so I'm gonna set this to a spherical and just change it to a little rounder rounded dots like so so if I play this now this is what its gonna look like you good so we have color for the emission channel and then luminance is going to be for the color now we can actually disable these channels they're still going to be active we don't need to see them and let's bring in our export occult let's get an XP system they're under the emitter I'm gonna go to the object tab and then let's set this to an object and the object is gonna be the Taurus uh I want to organize this a little better so I'm gonna bring in a null I'm gonna call this one GE Oh objects and I'm gonna take all these guys I'm just gonna drop them in side of that no just so we can stay organized and let's go back to the emitter and we want to omit from not the polygon Center we want to omit from a texture and when we do that we get an extra tab here so let's go into that tab so we have a slot for the texture so let's bring in that texture we just made and then the emit channel and the color channel is what we're interested in here so the emit channel is going to be the color channel that's the black and white texture we set up but the color channel we set up in the luminance channel so if we play in this back now let's just see what we get so we get something I can't I don't know if you can see on the screen recording here I'm gonna go to the display tag and let's bring this up to a circle that's gonna enable us to see it a little better and we do have our purple and our orange good so let's go to the emission tab and I'm gonna change the speed to 300 and I'm gonna reduce the radius to 1 usually when you work with fluids you want to have a radius you want to have a small radius it's just gonna look better that way so let me zoom out here and how we gonna get the particles to travel along the spline now well we're gonna do that by going to the dynamic objects and adding a glow field and in the flow field you can see we have all these arrows which is dictating how the particles are gonna travel now so if I hit play you can see that they shoot off in that direction the same direction as the arrows now first of all let's move this flow field up so it encompasses the s like so and we don't want to have it at the default flow what we do want is a long spline so we want to have it along the spline we created before so let's drag that into the object slot and that you can see that the arrows changed now let's play back and see what we get so something happened but it's going the opposite direction and you can actually tell by looking at these arrows you can see that it's actually gonna go in this direction and that has to do with the points order of the spline so what we need to do is we need to reverse the point order if I select the spline and go up to the splines menu then we can go to something called point order and say release reverse sequence so now you can see that instantly all these arrows changed now it's gonna go at least in the right direction now it's not doing exactly what we want yet so let's work on this a little bit more let's go back to the flow field and let me go to the display and turn off the vectors those are the arrows we don't need to see them let's go back to the general now the strength currently is only set to a hundred percent let us bring this all the way up to a hundred and that's gonna make this a little better so now they're following the spine pretty well but we also want to reduce the cell size now this is the resolution of the flow field so the lower this value the higher the resolution but if I set this down to eight it's gonna be a stronger effect and you can see that now it's following it pretty closely now it's obviously disappearing or is it's escaping the object and some are disappearing or leaving the object and we're gonna fix that in a few seconds but let's first add a little bit of extra movement within these particles and that we can do that in the modifiers and just add a turbulence and I don't want to have a lot if I go if I set this value up too high it's not gonna have the same type of blow in the objects here they get stuck so I just want to have a little bit so let's do 12 and I'm gonna reduce the scale obviously I've been playing a lot with this so III know but but the scale a little smaller scale is gonna look a little better in general here so okay so I think that's pretty good now how are we gonna stop them from escaping the object well we're gonna use we go to our extrude object right click and say X particles tagged and we want to use an X P a lighter and now he's gonna react to particles but it's not gonna work yet if I play this back see that it's still gonna do the same thing and that's because in the XP collider we need to set the normals to be instead of outside we want it to be inside like that so now now they're staying inside of this object now obviously we don't want to have them bunched up like this at the end but we're gonna worry about that in a few minutes here so that looks that looks quite good now you may get some of these guys escaping if that happens let me see if your go to control D which is gonna bring up my project settings you can see that I have my sub frames as step set up to 1 to 5 normally it's 1 see what that does it may some of them may disappear may not but if they escape you can bring up the sub frame steps I'm gonna bring it up actually to 5 so well that's good now what I want to do next is I want I don't want them to bunch up here I want to have them flow all the way almost all the way to the end here but right here I'm gonna slow them down so if I go to the XP meter and under the object tab we have under the emitter here we have a retiming feature and this is a really good feature inside of X particles so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna rewind and I'm gonna have it at a hundred percent until I'm I'm gonna go frame by frame till frame forty four I'm gonna set a keyframe or 100% hit G to go to the next frame and then I'm gonna go right down to three percent and then set a keyframe so this is gonna be a fairly abrupt change here so now if I play this back gonna go fast and then it's gonna slow down and this is a really nice feature of X particles and Jen I use it a lot so now we have the general set up is down but we need a lot more particles so I'm gonna go to my emitter and to the display and set it back to a put two dots and under the emission I'm gonna increase this a lot so instead of a thousand I'm gonna do 300,000 now we're not gonna get that amount because we are emitting from a texture but we're still gonna get a lot more particles so you're gonna get a much better sense of the flow of this now and I can try to have them stick a little less to the surface we can try to do that if we go into the collider object I'm gonna bring up the bounce to a hundred take down friction to zero and perhaps bring up scatter to a hundred but I think I think that looks I think that looks quite good now you can see how because we're emitting from that texture so yeah we have kind of different sections of the liquid it's just not one cohesive mass we have different sections of it which is gonna look really nice with the different swirls and stuff so that is the main setup for for the particles now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hide the tourists we don't need to see it and we certainly don't want to see it in the render either so let's mesh this now let's go to generators and choose open B DB measure and in the open VDB measure we need to bring in the emitter like that so it looks a little big and blobby but let's try to fix that now we're gonna change two settings here the point radius is how big each particle is I'm gonna set this down to two now everything is gonna disappear and that's because the voxel size which is essentially the resolution of the open V DB measure it's that we don't have enough resolution to display this so we need to reduce this down to one which is gonna increase the resolution and now we have the liquid me actually hide this one so we don't need to see it we can look at the liquid only so it looks a little blobby let's go to filters and I'm gonna enable filters get rid of that median let's add a Gaussian Gaussian is the smoothest of them all and on top of this I am gonna add a curvature and a curvature is usually pretty good at rounding any kind of point in s offices a more rounded effect now on top of this I'm also gonna add a smoothing the former and let's make sure we put that in the same null as the open V DV measure and I'm gonna go pretty aggressive with this I'm gonna take down the stiffness to four and then I'm gonna increase the iterations too early and that makes everything a lot smoother so that looks quite nice now the way we're gonna color this is if we go back to the open V DB measure and we can go to the tags and we have something called transfer point color and what that's gonna do is gonna bring in the color from our texture and we get this vertex color at this point vertex color and you can see what we have we can see the colors it looks a little jagged so what we can do is go back to the open V DB measure and then we can adjust the smoothing here if I set this up to 60 we're gonna have a nice and smooth transition between the orange and the purple so that looks nice and this is gonna translate very well into our actual mesh okay so next let's see how we can render it I'm gonna render with cycles 4d and let me bring back the scene elements that are prepared before we started and in here I just have a camera so let's look through that camera and it's just an 80 millimeter camera and it has a little bit of animation on it so it's null is just rotating just a little bit not a lot and I'm lighting this with a simple environment and an HDR eye and I'm using HDR I linked from greyscale gorilla and I mean if you don't have that I just use any hgri that you have and I found that studio lighting studio Lighting's were in general the best way to go but you have to experiment with that so let's twirl this up and let's go to a different layout I'm gonna go to my cycles layout and this one and in this layout I just have the viewport on the top right the objects manager and then the attributes manager at the bottom the previewer the cycles preview window is in the center and then I have the node editor on the left side so let's create cycles for the object material and let me put that on the Oh material there already let's delete that let's go down to the open V DB measure and put that material on it you and what I'm gonna do I'm gonna go to the node editor and I'm gonna take the point color here and I'm gonna drag it directly into the node editor and that's gonna create an attributes tag for us so inside of this attributes point color we are gonna get the colors directly now so I can pipe that into the base color and if I start this now you can see that we have the orange and we have that purple already in there now on top of this I am gonna add an admission so I'm gonna add shader and emission and I'm going to use the same color and put that into the color here now I want to blend the standard object color with the emission and one way we can do that is by using an ad shader if I go back to shader ad shader then I can add the two together I'm gonna put the the principal be SDF on the top and then the emission in the bottom slot here I can hit it so and then I'm gonna add this to the surface now this is gonna be a little too intense I don't want to have this much emissions I'm gonna go to the emission and here in the attributes on a jury I'm going to reduce that to point two I also want to add some subsurface scattering so if I go back to my principal B SDF I am gonna add some subsurface scattering so we can see through this object now the subsurface color is currently set to red I'm gonna let that to like a yellowish color something like that and that looks really nice subsurface scattering usually looks really really nice it does have a big render head but a lot of times is worth it so let's do that I'm also gonna set up this glass material so for that because it's slower to render let's take down the subsurface to zero for now and we'll bring it back after the glass is set up so let's go up here to our glass object and we need to turn on the extrude and we need to turn on the cloth and that let's go add a new material so cycles for D and then surface and I'm going to start with a glass material and that let's put the glass material on to the extrude and we'll click it okay so what I'm gonna do in the glass material and before I do that I just want to show you one thing in the render settings if I go to cycles 4d and to the section that deals with light paths and raid depth I have my max array bounces set up to 6 1 is the default if you have it set to 1 you're gonna get a black glass like this you need to have enough bounces so we can see the transparency here or we can see through the object you have to experiment from project to project but in this case I set it up to 6 and that looks good okay so let's close that now the glass here I am gonna change the IOR I'm actually gonna take it down to 0.9 t1 so this isn't exactly realistic but it doesn't really matter that's not what I'm going for here but what I do want I want some roughness on this surface so I'm gonna go I'm gonna get a texture and I'm gonna get a noise texture and let's if I highlight the FA see here the factor I can actually preview this directly on the object which is really handy in cycles 4d and I want the scale to be much bigger so I'm gonna set the scale up to something like 98 and when you reduce the number here I actually bring up the scale so so that it looks good now I'm gonna pipe this also through a ramp let's go get a converter and then color ramp and put the factor in there and let's solo the color uhh so I'm gonna bring in this one so we have a little bit more contrast something like so now if I take this ramp the color and pipe that into the roughness of this glass material and then I unsolo this it's really really rough so I want it to be rough but I don't want it to be quite that rough so what we can do is that we can take this color and I can just lower this to like a mid level gray like 60 around 60 or so and I think that looks a lot better so let's leave it at that and that's actually done so let's go back to the open V DB measure the material rather and let's go and enable our subsurface point three and it's got some more space here and I'm gonna increase the size to say seventy-five just we can see this a little better let's do let's do 12 here for the samples it takes a little while to render because we have subsurface scattering okay so I have passed there and rendered out a slightly higher resolution inversion so i up the samples to 30 now in the example that I showed you the animation I think I used 22 samples and I also did a still frame without 32 samples or something like that now one thing I do want to point out is that if you're gonna render this out as an animation and even as the still it is a good idea to cache this first so if you go to other objects and then go and get a XP cache and I was cached for external files so if I get some space here just select where you want to save it to and then build a cache it's a it's a much better way to go especially for the animation so it's a good idea to do that and that brings this tutorial to an end if you come up with some cool results send me some links so I can take a look you may perhaps want to do this on different letters or different shapes now all the project files are available on the loss of the peak comm thank you for sticking around and I'll see you next time

Channel: Velocitypeak

Views: 11,953

Rating: 4.9623823 out of 5

Keywords: X-Particles, 36daysoftype_s, Cinema 4D, liquid, motion graphics, Cycles 4D

Id: fA-vNAgGIeI

Length: 31min 20sec (1880 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020