X-Particles Vertex Maps Tutorial [Free Project]

hi this is Jasper from velocity' peak and in today's X particles and cinema 4d tutorial we're going to use the new vertex maker inside of X particles and we're gonna make this you so we're using vertex maps to drive the particles and also the textures if you want to follow along the project files are available on velocity peak comm okay let's jump in okay so let's start to begin with I just have this pile of rubble or these cogs and let me just show you how I set that up first I'm gonna go to a different file and so I just have this cog with four pieces in it and this is really part of a steampunk mask that I modeled sometime ago and I put them in side of a cloner and I put push the cloner down a little closer to the floor and then I added some randomness to this and I just pushed them apart yes sir they're not intersecting and when they start and I'm gonna use a dynamic tag for this and on the plane at the bottom I have a Collider body so let's go to the first cylinder hole and I'm gonna add simulation and a rigid body tag let me drag this guy to the right side and let me copy that to all the other ones as well like so and it's just gonna make a few changes so this one settles quicker and take down the bounce up the friction to 95 and drain the energy little quicker I'm gonna take up the damping to just 15 and 15 for the linear and angular damping and so let's play this ants can't drop down to the floor them I mean you may have to experiment with this a little bit I certainly did tried a few different setups with the random and so until I found something that I liked but once you find something that you like I want to convert this to regular parts but you can't just if I hit C on my cloner they're actually gonna jump right back up so I'm gonna undo that so instead what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start play through until the end and then I am gonna go in here I'm gonna select all these tags and then I'm gonna go to the cache and I'm just gonna bake this that's really quick and then I'm going to play this back find the frame that I want and then I am gonna make this editable by hitting C on the keyboard and now I actually have all these individual parts that we can use so that's how I set that up so but I'm gonna use the original set that I had okay so now let's move on to adding the vertex maps and that I'm gonna add to vertex maps one is gonna drive the particles and that one is gonna drive the textures so let me go to X particles and utilities and XP vertex map and as I understand it this has been completely rewritten from the ground up and it truly is fantastic I really like this so for example let me show you one thing that we can do with this one that we cannot do with the standard vertex maps in cinema 4d I'm gonna go I'm gonna get a mo text and I'm just gonna zoom out it doesn't matter what it says here but let me get just that thicker font bold so what we can do with this new vertex map make it from X particles is that we can actually add vertex maps to parametric object which is terrific fantastic so for example if I would go to select and try to create set vertex weight which is one way that we can create a vertex map it doesn't work because this needs to be an editable object to work but by going into the vertex map the XP vertex map I can take this mo text I can simply drag it down and you as you see we have a vertex map to see that if I select a vertex map you can see that it's red indicating that this is a vertex map but it's a blank one we don't have anything on it yet one thing I do want to point out when you work with vertex maps is that they are resolution dependent so let me show you what I mean by that let me go into n D so we can see the lines we don't we don't have a lot of segments here so let me go into the vertex map and let me pull this up so the way it works now is I can go to ad and then we can add all these things to interact with the vertex map we have you can use explosion effects see the objects just like in an in fact show we can use seed maps or vertex maps polygons splines textures X particles curvature and ambient occlusion so let me just add a Myint occlusion and I just want to talk a little bit about geometry and vertex maps so I added it and I don't see anything as of yet let me zoom in here I don't see anything as of yet let me go back to the vertex map and let's see but if I try a different angle perhaps the distance and I don't see a change so let me go to the mo text and up the subdivision huh we start seeing something here right so this is very dependent on how much geometry that you have and so I'm gonna add some more subdivisions and also the intermediate points rather than adaptive let's do say uniform and I can up this a little bit but the front is still an end gone so let's go to caps and I am gonna change the caps type from n gone to regular grid and that we can make that a little smaller and you can see that we are starting to get all the details and now we could go into the vertex map maker into ambient occlusion and we can make adjustments to this as we need I just wanted to bring you bring that to your attention but we're not going to use the mo text we are going to use the ruble that we created in the previous step so let me go to n SC so we don't see the lines and now these cogs are put inside of a subdivision surface and then I also put them inside of a connect object now to work a little quicker let's turn off the subdivision surface like so okay so let's go back to the vertex map maker and I'm just gonna delete everything in here and start fresh so instead of the mo text I am gonna use connect ruble and then let's see there we go we have a vertex map so let me click on it and it's red so let's go back to the vertex map maker and the first thing I am gonna use is if I go to add I'm gonna use curvature and you can immediately see that we have a result so we have some settings for the curvature we don't have a lot of settings but we do have some settings we can control the brightness and the contrast and then we also have smoothing so let me bring up the contrast to 100% and I'm gonna bring down the brightness to around minus 70 because I don't want to have a lot of things going on on the on the front here or the top of the objects I want them to be really touristic crevices so brightness of minus 72 seems to be pretty good and just gonna add 2 for the smoothing okay so we also have a polygon here that came by default but I'm gonna delete that and that we can also have more than 1 object effective so right now we have curvature right but we can also add more to this and if you see that we have something called layers we can blend the different objects together using blend modes so let's do that let's add for example let's add a texture so I'm gonna go here I'm gonna create a new texture by double clicking in the materials manager just open that up and pull it over here turn off the reflectance and let's see so we can see what's going on I'm going to deselect the vertex map and then I'm just going to put this texture onto the rubble and then let's go in and just add a noise and us going to the noise and not sure we are actually seeing anything let me hit n Q to make sure we have materials turn on that's n Q or under options materials and then I'm just gonna up the scale somewhat and then bring up the contrast just we have something like this going to close this I'm gonna hit n Q to turn off the materials don't need to see them and I'm gonna select the vertex map and then let's go back to the vertex map maker and I'm gonna say add a texture and immediately it works now in texture here under options it's going to look texture tag to use is going to be the first tagging object now we can also set this to be select tag and then we can just drag this one in like so so now we can only see the texture we can't see the curvature so if we want to have them blend together I can select the texture and I can go to the layers the layers tab here and I can switch the blend mode and so we have several different ones to choose from but what I want I want less so I'm gonna use the min and now we can really only see it on these crevices but it's less intense so if I turn off the texture you see we cut off some just to get some variation in there so that's good now what I actually want to have with the particles is I want to have this come on and off so I want like a slice of emission for for the particles later on and want to slice through here but I don't want it to be on all the time I want it to start here travel through and then go over to this side and then stop emitting so one way we can do that is by using polygon objects so let me show you what I mean I'm gonna get a capsule and let me put this on a plus X so so let's see what camera angle do I want to use so I think I'm gonna use this camera angle a little closer so I want to have this capsule start over here now I'm going to make it a little longer and I can pull it up like so so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna animate this capsule starting here and going to the other side and wherever this one is touching the rubble and that's we're gonna be the zone where the particles are being emitted and I want to make sure it's tall enough so it covers the top cog here and it is I think it's a little too thick so what we can do is we go into coordinates we can this is gonna be the Z we can shrink this a little bit so it's a little skinnier something like that and then what I'm gonna do is I am gonna keyframe this so on frame 0 I'm gonna set a keyframe and then I'm gonna go to frame 90 and I'm just gonna pull it through and I want to make sure that this is all the way through like so and set another keyframe I want to make sure this is also a linear animation so that's a bright click animation show track just gonna make all these linear by clicking this button here like that and I also want to hide it as it travels through so let me by right-click and go to render tags and display I'm gonna use shading mode lines so now we can see it as it passes through okay so let's stop at that frame so let's go back to the vertex map maker and under the object tab I'm gonna go and I'm gonna add a polygons and I'm gonna turn off the rest of this stuff for now and I'm gonna put that at the bottom and I need to tell X particles what polygon object I want to use if I go to options I can just simply take this capsule and drag it down and we can't see anything because we need to have the vertex map selected so let's select it and that you can see something happened so we have yellow on this side and yellow on this side and that's because by default this is gonna use the surface of the object that could be handy from time to time so if you wanted to have like a finer range you could you can tighten this up or you can expand this as you want but we can also use the volume and that's what I'm gonna use I'm gonna use two volume for this so that looks pretty good now I do want to smooth this out so if I go to effects I can just add a little bit of smoothing perhaps one two three four five something like that so now I want to combine all these things together so it's gonna be a fairly subtle effect on the end so I'm gonna keep polygons that the bottom object here as is I'm gonna go to curvature and I'm gonna enable that so to have these interact together we go to the layers tab and instead of blend mode normal I'm gonna set this to minimum so now you can see that this is only happening wherever that capsule is traveling and let's also enable the texture which is going to make it even more subtle and we have that set to minimum as well so now we have this as a mat for the particles to use there's only going to emit where we have yellow areas and I want to remind you that this could be done to a polygonal object I mean to a parametric object as well which is quite amazing so so that's the first vertex map now I want to name this vertex map so if I select this one here there is a name we call this VM source by default but let's call this one vertex particles and then you're gonna see that this is going to correspond to this vertex map that's been created now I'm gonna duplicate this vertex map so I'm gonna hold down control and make a copy and let's name these as well vertex map articles and then this guy is gonna be for the materials so materials myself and let's rename this right away so vertex and this is going to be materials and then we want to double check make sure that this one took particles material so now we have two separate vertex maps and that we can reuse most things that we used before with one major difference I want the material to transfer at the same time as the particles are emitted but I want that to stay I don't want to stop so I want to have the new materials stay on the object so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to this materials and I'm just gonna create a cube and let's see and let me also do the same thing they've been good to render tags and display and use a lines on that guy and I want to make sure that this one is big enough to encompass the entire rubble which is is but I don't it doesn't need to be that tall perhaps like that and I'm going to use the volume of this cube and so now I'm gonna leave it here this is gonna be on frame and 90 and then let's set a keyframe for my cube and it's gonna be on the Z so let's set a keyframe not for the size but for the position and then I'm gonna go back to zero and I'm gonna pull this one this way and you may have to experiment a little bit if you want material to overlap like this or if you want it to lag behind you may want to have it lag behind a little bit if you want the particles to appear to drive the whole thing or you can have it a little sooner if you want to want it to seem like the material is driving the particles so that's a choice you have to make but I'm just gonna set it right there and click keyframe and I want to make sure this is a linear keyframe as well let's go to animation show track and let's make this a linear like so so now let's play back make sure it works and it does it's a little slow but it works so let's take a look at this vertex map now the four materials so as you can see as I play this the material is coming on the oh we haven't actually change anything so let's go and change this so for the vertex map for materials let's go to object and instead of the capsule let's go to polygons options and let's delete the capsule and instead let's get the cube and now you can see that the material is going to be it's going to stay on the object perfect and that's essentially it for the vertex maps we now have two different maps that we can use for both the materials and for the emission of particles so let's set clean up the scene a little bit let's get let's call this one vertex drivers and let's put them in there so and we don't need to see them so I can actually hide them and let's go and let's get a XP system and I kind of prefer to have that below so let's do that and in the XP system let's go to the emitter and let's start with the object tab so in the object tab I'm gonna go and I'm gonna select object for the emitter shape and the object that we're going to be emitting from is going to be the Kinect ruble and then we can use a selection and I want to make sure that I use the correct one which is going to be vertex a map for vertex particles let's drag that in and I do want to admit from just a polygon area so let's set that to polygon area and to make sure we can actually see this let's go to display and I'm gonna set this instead of dots for the editor display let's set this to a circle and while we're at it but might as well change the colors as well so instead of a single color I'm going to go to gradient random and that we can just use that later on when we want the color the particles so I'm just gonna pull down the middle knots and set this blue one to black go to the emission tab and let's just take down the speed to zero and let's just play back and see what we get see that they're being born they're only being born where we have that vertex map now what I want to have is I want them to die after a certain period of time so I'm gonna set instead of full lifespan I'm gonna say a lifespan of 90 with a variation of 20 and then we're gonna add some scaling to this so they don't just stop existing let's leave the birthrate at a thousand for now as we work I'm gonna up this to 40,000 when we actually render this and I'm gonna set these to be a really small point one with a variation of 0.1 so that can be anywhere in between 0 and 0.2 so let me zoom in and see what we get so they being born and it is a little slow but the result is actually worth it you so so now some of them are going to be dying okay good okay so let's start having these particles be a little bit more lifelike and the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add some gravity to the scene so let's go to modifiers and then motion modifiers and let's add gravity and 981 is it's too strong it's gonna be - it's gonna happen too fast so let's set it to a hundred and now they're going to fall down but of course they're not reacting with the floor and they're not reacting with the object so let's let's add some colliding tags to this and I start with a floor I'm gonna do X particles tags and let's do a XP Collider and I set the friction to 20 so bounce 20 and friction 20 you may want to play with the friction as you add the material because the friction should ideally match the type of material that you have I could probably have done a better job of that in my example but okay and then let's take this one and add it as well to the Kinect ruble so I'm going to control drag that and then let's play back and see what we get so they are dropping down and now they are reacting with the floor and it works good let's give them some more life and I'm gonna do that by going to the dynamics options and I'm gonna add a fluid effects now this obviously isn't fluids but I'm gonna use that and let me just play it back you may notice that they are gonna explode and take off you can see they they took off there and that's because of the internal and external pressure which all fluid fluids have but I'm going to set this to zero and zero so that they don't explode out and just gonna leave it at that it's gonna give us a little bit more life to the particles like so moving around just a little bit more now to increase this and what I'm gonna do is I'm also gonna add some turbulence so let me go to modifiers motion modifiers and then let's do XP turbulence and I want this to be really really really tiny so scale of one and a strength of one just want a hint if you do too much it's gonna appear like they are traveling on the floor and you could potentially also counteract that with some more friction but I'm gonna leave that at a very low value just a little bit more live like so and let me zoom in here I'm not sure if you can see but they are intersecting and I'm gonna use another new modifiers and other modifiers with this new XP particles release if I go to motion modifiers and then I go to XP push apart this is a really really good new modifier as well now I'm gonna change the distance at the distance mode from absolute to use particle radius so now it's going to respect the radius of each and every particle that we have and if you remember they are going to be between zero and point two so now they're not going to intersect but they're still clumping together like a fluid which is great so one more thing that I want to do is I don't want them to all of a sudden disappear I want them to gradually decrease in size so we can do that with just a scale modifier there is several different ways you can do and different approaches you can take to do this but a very straightforward approach is to use a scale modifier so let's do that let me go to modifiers and then we can go to control modifiers and then we have XPe scale and so the parameter to change I'm gonna keep particle radius the operation we are gonna change this value over time but what we're gonna do we're gonna do relative and when you do relative it's going to respect the actual size of the particles and I'm gonna set this to right now we're setting to 5% just gonna get bigger but I want this to be smaller and remember our particles are so small to begin with so we even need to go mild on this value so I'm gonna do - point 35% and I don't want to clamp to any limit so I'm going to just uncheck that so no radius limit so now that we play this back is gonna continue to get smaller and smaller and smaller and instead of just disappearing they're gonna appear to just scale down and then disappear that way and there you go great so that is the base for the particle setups and that now what I want to do is I want to cache this and I want to add a lot more particles so let me go back to my emitter and for the display I'm going to set it back to a two dots and under emission us up this instead of a thousand that's 240 thousand and then I want to cash this so the cached is I'm gonna go to X particles and get an XP cash object and I'm gonna cache these two external files and let me just do that quickly so I'm gonna go to my media drive I have a folder for X particles caches do that one and build as cache and I'll be back once this is cashed okay so the cash is done and let's play back and see what we get from the left side and are travelling further and further to the right and then I'm gonna scale down and eventually die and it's working good so that's the main part of a particle setup now in terms of texturing I built all the textures outside of cinema 4d so I brought them in as image textures except for the particles themselves but I want to show you how you can use the vertex maps now to set up your textures so I'm gonna quickly show you one of the the textures here which is the most complex texture and essentially I have two two materials two textures and that I combine and I add some emission as well and this is set up with a try plane or set up but the main thing is this but here is why where I blend the two textures with a mixed shader and then I am driving this with the vertex map and an attributes node so let me show you how I set it up so let's let's add a temporary material to the floor just so it's not empty add that to the floor let's see I also have to enable some lighting so we can actually see something so I'm gonna do this okay and then let me open or actually let me create cycles for D let me create an object material to that material is how you blend material so what I'm gonna do is so it's gonna create two colors that look different enough that we can tell them apart let me make this a purple color of some sort like so and then let's make a copy I'm sure we'll drag that out let's just make a different color so we can tell them apart and to blend two colors now we use we right-click and the say shader and we want a mix shader' I'm going to pipe this into shader - this into shader one and then I'm going to put this into this surface so to blend between these I am gonna use two factor input now and that let me get some space so what you can do is that you can take the vertex map and the correct one which is the material one and you can simply drag it in and then when I do that we get an attribute node but we also get an attribute tag on the object and if I select that you can see that we have vertex materials and that name should correspond with the ear with the node here vertex materials it sets that up for you automatically and by if you swap them out you may need to make sure that they match so with that setup we can simply just take the factor and put that inside of the mix shader' and now it's gonna mix between these two materials based on that vertex map so let me just show you what that's gonna look like if I open my cycles for the real-time preview and we set this down to 75 and we also need to apply the material so let's get this on to the rubble and make sure it's on the right side let's make sure that we actually have some lighting going on we need to turn this on so there you have it so you can see the green color is the main material that and then we have this purple which is driven by the vertex map so that's how that works and obviously this isn't the actual example but I'm going to show you also how I set up the particles so I'm gonna go to cycles 4d just to surface and then emission and then let's go into that emission let me pull this over to this side and I want to use the colors we set up in the emitter so I'm gonna right click and say input particle info this is one of the strengths of using cycles for T with X particles you get all these data points and I'm going to take the color but I'm gonna put it inside of a ramp that we can colorize this this is the black to white ramp random that we set up before and so just gonna make some colors here random colors I used blue in the early example example so I'm gonna use that here as well and can a blue color and then blue on this side as well let's just change the hue slightly like that and if I enable my real-time preview make this smaller so we can actually see both things at the same time scale is down like so and then we need to apply this oops just not working out as I want now we also need to apply this to the emitter and we need to also right-click and go to cycles 40 tags and add an instance and so now we can see some particles let me zoom in a little bit but so so I also added something I'd like to do with particles a lot especially when you have a lot of particles I like to have like a hot area where they overlap that's gonna be hotter and we can do that with an add shader and transparency so I'm gonna do shader a transparent shader down here and I'm gonna get another shader and instead of a mixed shader add shader so these are both added on top of each other if I put the emission here and then this they're gonna be blended together I generally like to do that we're going to start getting these nice hot spots you can see that where they're overlapping is getting hotter and you can control that of course with the emission strength so if I wanted to have that a little bit more accentuated or exaggerated just up there the emission strength but that's essentially it so that's that's how he works to set this up now I also want to show you how you can use the vertex map in redshift okay so to set this up in redshift is also easy let me just remove all all the cycles objects let me remove that and that in that cycles material and that cycles material turn up that softbox or I think redshift is going to give us an error and let's I do have a temporary floor material for redshift as well and let's go ahead and build a redshift material now so redshift materials material let's go into that material and let's make sure we put that on to the rubble make sure it's on the right side it is and let's just make two distinct colors we can tell them apart and like red and then control-drag that to make a copy and then make this different like blue perhaps good to blend them in rich if you just use the material blender material blender but that color into base material and then do this one into layer one layer color one and this goes into the output so to use the vertex map now as the deciding factor let's search for vertex and we want to use this guy the vertex attribute and that we want to make sure that we pull in the correct vertex map into this field so it should be this one let's do yeah the material the material ones so now we just pipe this into the material blender layer one and as the blend color and let's take a look let's opened the redshift render view and a little big way back and yeah there you have it that's how that's how we can use the vertex maps with redshift and that brings this tutorial to an end let me know in the comments what you think of the new vertex maker from X particles and if you found some value in this consider subscribing so you don't miss the next tutorial the files are available on velocity peak comm and there are two versions one that has the textures included as well thank you for sticking around and I'll see you next time

Channel: Velocitypeak

Views: 4,101

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: X-Particles, XParticles, Cinema4D, Cinema 4D, vertex maps, vertex map, Insydium, Maxon, vfx, particles, simulation, cgi, motion graphics, 3d, visual fx, tutorials, tutorial, tip, 3d animation, tuts, x-particles tutorials, x-particles 4, x-particles 4 training, x-particles vertex maps

Id: bmTiBLfXE3E

Length: 39min 37sec (2377 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020