xpReel Tutorials, Particle Advection, X-Particles - Part 1

[Music] hi I'm Bob from in Cydia we make X particles and cycles for D and in this tutorial video we're going to be recreating this scene from the X particles real so this scene is all about particle advection we're going to be setting up an explosion FX fire and smoke simulation that's going to push around our particles we're also going to be integrating our X particle system within the inbuilt cinema 4d mograph tools and then we're going to burn in some really important particle color data into our cache this is what we're going to be using later on when it comes to render time so let's get started so let's build our scene so we'll start off by going to the X particles menu and bringing in an explosion effects domain this is where we're going to be simulating our explosion effects gaseous simulation so that's that now we need to produce the object from which we're going to emit our gas and also where we're going to be missing our particles from and the way in which we're going to do this is we'll start off by bringing in a cylinder object and this cylinder object that's gonna be way too big so let's give it a radius of maybe two and a height of four maybe so let's have a look so we made this tiny little cylinder that okay and that's actually a wee bit too small so let's go with a radius of five and a height of yeah high default keep that default and that looks all right for now we can make adjustments in a bit if we need to right so what we're going to do is we want several cylinders to emit from and the quickest way of doing that is to use mograph so with a cylinder highlighted I'm gonna hold the Alt key and then go to the mograph menu and pick cloner and it automatically makes a cylinder a child of this cloner and then if I just dolly out a bit so the cloner is set to in a linear fashion clone objects on the y axis it's set to three so if I put this up it'll make more or less so we don't want linear we want to make a grid array now we have array of cylinders and we don't want multiple ones on the y-axis just one that's it so we've got kind of like a flat grid of cylinders and we've got nine that'll probably be enough now we can add this later I mean it's it's mograph which means it'll remain editable the whole time which is cool it may it remains parametric which is nice so let's add a little bit of Random randomness to this cuz at the moment we'll just got these laid out and this grid-like pattern which isn't gonna look good so we'll go to the cloner and with the clone highlighted we're going to go to the mograph menu to the effectors menu and we'll pick a random effector and by default suddenly the clones are all randomly moved around let's go to the random effect as parameters and by default it's got position enabled and we've got random movement on the XY and z axis so let's take away the Y random movement because we don't want that so that was just randomly spaced out on the X and the Z which is not bad and let's do a little bit of random scale as well so we want to uniformly scale them let's do a scale of 1 and so doing a scale of 1 means that some of them are going to go down to virtually zero which is not what we want let's put a scale of 0.5 it was 0.5 that looks all right and then I'm just going to scale up my cylinders radius like that okay good and then in the cloner it's a little bit too wide now so I'm going to just reduce the size of this a little bit say to 150 by 150 all right and then I'm just going to have a look at some random distributions so if I go to the random effector and go to the affected tab I can change the seed which I'll just distribute them in different ways according to that seed and I'll just keep going till I get to one that I like the look of all right that one's quite spaced out and I quite like it so that's what we'll pick excellent okay so now what we're gonna do so there's gonna be our cylinders from where we're going to emit our EFX smoke and fire simulation but what we need to do is we're gonna have to put this in a connect object for that to work so I'll hold alt with it highlighted with a clone highlighted and I'll go to this menu and I'll pick connect and now these are a child of my connect object and I'm now going to tell this connect object to be an explosion FEX emitter so to do that when you go to tags X particles tags explosion effects source tag so now if I hit play these are emitting fuel okay good so that's kind of where we need to be with that so I also want to use the objects within this to be our particle emitters and the particles are going to be moved by that fluid simulation so Mario did this in his scene file which you can find in our content repository and it's really really good it's a really clever trick so what he did was this he brought in a plane and he just lets just scale that down to make it similar dimensions to our clone and so we've got a plane and we need to make sure that it's intersecting every cylinder which it is and now what we're going to do is I tell you what to demonstrate why this is clever I'm going to leave that for now and I'm gonna put in a material on the plane so let's create a cinema 4d material by double clicking here and if I just double click that we can bring in the material let it set right so in the color Channel I'm going to go to texture and noise and we can hit this to go into the noise settings and I want to pick a kind of turbulent quite detailed noise so gaseous is one that works well that's that's good and we're using black and white values with this noise that's why we want to use it we want to give the particles black and white values and we want to tell the emitter to emit from sir using these black and white values and at the moment it's a little bit too muddy into gray so what we're going to do is increase the low clip and reduce the high clip which will clamp it a bit okay something like that we can make adjustments later should we need to all right so there's our noise so I'm going to put our noise on our plane and there we have we have it mapped to our plane so that's pretty good so now this is why we are going to do this trick that Mario used in his scene so we've got this noise map to the plane now what I want to do is I want to emit from this plane from this noise but only where these spheres these cylinders are so how do we do that well we're going to use a bool so going to this menu and we'll bring in a bool object and in the bool object I want to put the plane and I also want to put our connect object which has got the cylinders in it so at the moment not a lot is happening because the bool is set to a subtract B so what it's saying is out of these two objects take object a which are the cylinders and get rid of the plane and so that's just left the cylinders behind that's not what we want if we change that to a intersect B where we will see where a intersects would be where the cylinders intersect with the plane it'll leave behind the geometry so we should have if we select this we should have disks and there they are fantastic so now we've just got these disks and because we've got it set up within a bool it means that this noise texture that we put on the plane remains in place so everyone has a different part of the noise texture applied to it but it's from the same noise so it's the same scale and it's the same clipping and whatnot so it's the same noise but each one it looks fairly random excellent so that's what we want from that so the explosion effects is still being emitted from our cylinders but now we have this bool object which has created these nice disks with this noise texture attached to it which is good so let's I'm just going to switch off my exposure effects for now so now what I want to do is bring in an emitter and emit from these disks so we'll go to X particles emitter bring emitter into the scene we'll go to the object tab of the emitter and the emitter shape we're going to change it from rectangle to object the object from which we want to emit our particles is the is the bool it is these disks that the Bulls made so we'll put the bool in there excellent so now if I hit play we've got particles being emitted from these disks and nowhere else very nice we're going to go one step further I'll just change the display mode to squares so you can see it and I'll admit more particles so it becomes more obvious so that we've got our squares being emitted from our pool now can you see that it's a bit jittery and we're getting gaps where there's no emission now I'm not entirely sure of the reason but I know it's it's something to do with the way in which the ball is calculating it I don't know whether that's because the bool is making a calculation every frame and at some point that's interfering with the emission of that particle but if you click the Create single object option within the bool it seems to sort that out not entirely sure why I'm not clever enough but it works so you want to be doing that so now we've got the emission just from the bool but we're going to go one step further because we want to color these particles and define where they're being emitted from using the noise so in the emitter settings in the object tab we are going to instead of emitting them from the polygon Center we're going to emit these particles from a texture and when I click texture a new submenu appears this tab here and if we go to this tab I'm able to drag in a texture tag so I'm gonna drag in my noise tag into there and it's saying it's going to let's just I'm going to switch off AM it for now so at the moment it's just it's gonna color the particles using the color Channel so let's see what happens so now the particles are being colored depending on this noise pattern on each disk which is cool because we're going to be using this variation of from white to black in the color of these particles when we come to render this and this is the data that is going to allow us to have some parts of these particles glowing blue and some part of them glinting wrought gold reflections and some of them being quite quite quite a kind of a dark diffuse material and we're going to define how we render those in that way by using these black and white color values so that's why it's really important that we do it so the only other thing that we're able to do we can omit from the color channel as well and what this is going to do is where it is white it'll be emitting kind of full force and then as it goes down to gray it will emit fewer and fewer particles to the point where when it is black there'll be no particles being emitted whatsoever there we go and if I just make a few changes to the noise you can change the way in which this is happening so if I move that we're going to get more and more particles because I'm introducing more lighter tones to the texture if I increase that there's gonna be fewer and fewer because it's mostly just it's mostly just these white colors so we don't want it too wide we want enough particles to play with in the render that's probably going to do this but again we can all just this along the way it's procedural so we're not penalized into anything right so obviously we don't want the particles flying up like this it looked terrible we want the portal's particles to have no speed whatsoever so let's go to the emission tab and knock off all the speed and now they're just being emitted from this noise and not moving anywhere good we want the explosion effects to move these particles and let's just switch off the emitter switch explosion back on so we want the particles to follow this fluid simulation so let's look at that fluid simulation and getting it get it moving slightly more like we're going to want to it to add vector particles so first of all I'm going to take the bool which has everything within it and I'm going to move it down to the bottom of the EFX grid there we go that gives us a bit more room to play with okay very nice so let's start manipulating this simulation so what we're going to do is and we're actually going to view this at the moment we're looking at the fuel and the smoke which is the fire and smoke and this is set in the explosion effects display settings fuel and smoke but I'm actually going to view the temperature output and I'm going to view the temperature output for a reason if you can see at the moment all of these plumes are kind of lifting up at a very uniform rate which is going to look a little uniform in our render once we get our particles we want a little bit more variation in how these are rising upwards and the technique that I'm going to use requires us to kind of view it in temperature mode which will make sense in a couple of minutes right so at the moment these are raising up far too quickly do you think we're not actually getting real-time playback in our preview here as it's simulating so in reality these things are going to be shooting up when we're playing this in real time and they want to be a like a relatively low slow kind of languid move up because this is this is an underwater scene so how are we going to slow that down well let's go to our exposure effect settings and when you got go to the simulation tab and the way we're gonna do this we're gonna control the rise of this fluid using the gravity setting now the gravity setting is a bit hard to get your head around it's not it doesn't work as most gravity settings and other modifiers would so if you were to ramp up this gravity setting here it's not going to make this fluid fall to the ground like gravity would is actually going to multiply it speed and that's because what the gravity does it multiplies these three buoyancy amounts and so what we actually want to do is take this down from the default of just over nine to around I don't know let's just say for now this should rise up much more slowly so there you go that is rising more slowly but I think it might still be a bit quick let's go to three and that's better I think that's looking like a more slow steady rise up now we've still got this problem that they're all kind of rising in a uniform way so the way in which we're going to solve this and why we've changed this to temperature view is that we're going to make some adjustments in our burning model so at the moment we have these default settings max heat 1 ignition heat of 0 and a burn rate variation of point to the maximum these numbers can go to is 1 well they can go away above 1 but they won't do anything it's 0 to 1 this this number so what we want is we want more burn rate variation so I'm gonna stick that right up to the maximum of 1 but I'm also going to adjust the ignition heat so at the moment there is no ignition heat which means that if I just nip back to my fuel and smoke smoke display we've got burning and the burning is then creating this smoke if I increase my ignition heat up just to the max of 1 you'll notice that it becomes so hot on ignition that it is burning away all of the molecules and so it isn't actually able to produce any smoke at all everything being burnt by this by this fire and by having ignition heat on one it means that our burn rate variation has much more of an impact which means if I now go to my temperature view we will see that we have more variation in the way in which these are moving up look this is burnt out at this point this one is burnt out here and these are moving now in slightly more varied ways it's not as uniform as it was so that's working for that and also I want more movement in this and so we're going to include another modifier to do that a turbulence modifier so let's go to the modifiers menu motion and turbulence we need to tell explosion to be affected by this turbulence so let's go to the modifier tab of explosion and drag it in so now it will be affected let's see what happens so the turbulence is moving this fluid around on the x y&z quite a lot too much for I think what we want so let's just have a little look at the settings of the turbulence so I can see that the scale of this is too big these waves and these curls are too big for our scene so I'm going to set this down to maybe I don't know 44 now and it's obviously way too strong as well I also I don't want the turbulence to affect how the fluid is moving up I want the buoyancy of the of the effects to be doing that so I want me I'm gonna disable the turbulence on the y-axis so now it's only affecting the fluid on the X and z axis that's looking good and it's way too strong so let's put this down to say I don't know one okay and that's looking pretty nice so it's very difficult to get a real idea of what's happening by viewing the explosion effects preview so let's hide that let's reintroduce our emitter and if we hit play nothing happens those particles are just moving ever so slightly and that's because they're being affected by this turbulence on the X and the z-axis but not the explosion we have to tell explosion to add vector particles in the scene so let's go to advection switch it on we don't need to give the particles any smoke burn temperature color or UV information we just want the velocity data so now if we hit play our particles are being advective and there we go and we can move around and we're getting some variation in the way in which these are moving up some are going quicker some are going slower and this is gonna look nice in our render right so we're kind of getting there now I think we could let's just go to the emitter settings at the moment we have got this display set two squares just let's put it two dots so it'll seem a little bit more quickly that's looking nice and the emission how many are we emitting we're only missing 10,000 per second so we need to up that we're gonna want a hundred thousand per second let's have a look at this one so loads more particles now and we're kind of getting an idea of how this is going to look once it's rendered nicely we've got some nice color variation which we're going to use in cycles to help us render and I think that's looking good all right so that's good so what we need to do now is we're gonna set up a cache for this because obviously when it comes to rendering you want to be able to scrub backwards and forwards and try out different bits and if we cache it everything is going to work much more quickly so to get that cache set up what we need to do is go to the X particles tab we'll go to the other objects menu and pick an XP cache here is our cache object and we need to get this set up and old you know what I think I've actually forgotten one thing which is going to be really significant when it comes to render time you wouldn't notice it now but it will be later and that is this I'm just going to go to my emitter I'm going to reduce the amount of particles that were emitting so there's far for you in the scene because we need to add some rotation to these particles now in dots mode you're not going to notice this rotation so let's just go to the display and temporarily change it to boxes right so now we've got these boxes and you can see that their orientation is remaining the same no matter how they're being pushed by this particle they aren't rotating in any way and actually what we want them to do is to rotate in the direction in which they're traveling and this is going to be used in cycles because we want to play around with getting some light glints bouncing off these particles as they as they rotate and reflect light from the various light sources and it's going to be really integral to our final look to be able to do that so the way we're going to add that rotation is in the emitter we'll go to the extended data tab and we'll click use rotation and the mold we want to sent it so set it to tangential rotation so now if I hit play you'll see that the particles are always facing the way in which they're traveling and this is really important to get to this variation of rotation as I say because we're going to be glinting light and bouncing light off these particles and by having them rotate like this those glints will flash on and off and that they're part of this this very stylized look so that rotation is vital good so now we've got that we'll go back to our display let's go back to dots let's go back to the emission tab and put it back on to a hundred thousand particles per second so now we can't see that rotation is happening but we know that is recording that data and we're going to use that when we get into the render excellent so back to our cache object then so this is going to be quite the big cache we're gonna be caching about 400 frames so what I'd advise when you're using a big cache is to cache to external files so you have this bit selected to external you then put a file path in this window here and it will save a cache file for every frame and this is the way you should do it with large caches I'm just at four eases sake of recording this tutorial I'm gonna record this to internal memory which will save all of that cache data within the cinema 4d file but with large caches that can become a nightmare because every time you want to save you seen you having to save all of that cache data over and over again and it it can take forever so I wouldn't advise you to do it this way so now I've got that I'm just gonna go to my exclusion tab and I'm going to exclude the EFX we don't need to cache this fluid information it's needless we just need to cache the petition in the color of the particles okay so what I'll do now we're there we'll go back to the object tag of the cache and I'm gonna hit build cache this is going to chug away and I will pause this recording here and come back to you once this cache has finished so that cache took about four minutes to get through I stopped caching it at 311 frames because I'm not gonna need any more than that in our render so let's just change our timeline to 311 and so the cache used nine point three two gigabytes of data that's how big it is so that means that every single time because I saved it internally every single time I save this cinema4d file it has to save much data which means gonna take forever so it's it's it's not a very sensible way of working and that's why I urge you if you're going to do this cache it to external files so then it will hold all of that cache information in a separate folder which means that you're able to save and incrementally save this cinema4d file really quickly and easily and it's a much more sensible way of working so now that we have our cache sorted the particles the color and their position has been cached so I can disable all of this other stuff that was driving our scene I can disable all of the bull stuff explosion FEX the random effect and the turbulence I don't need any of that all the the only thing I need active in the scene is the emitter and the cache object and now I we can scrub through backwards and forwards and look at our animation and if we play it they probably won't play in real-time but we'll get decent playback because it's not having a chug through and make explosion effects calculations now so that's looking pretty nice we've got some nice varied rising we've got our particles which are colored with varying degrees of black and white which we're going to use in the render to get the effect that we want and of course this can be rendered from lots of different angles the render that we are going to be looking at is the one from the reel where they the particles kind of wash up past the camera so something like something like this this movement as they come up words and we can mess around with which angle we want to use that from but that's the look that we're going for but obviously you can shoot this from for whatever angle you wish you can just come in very close to one of these plumes and have it coming up and it's gonna look it's gonna look nice okay so the cache is there all of the data is contained within this to get the looks that we require in our render so this is going to finish part one of this particle advection tutorial in part two be looking at how Maria rendered this in cycles 4d don't forget loads of free content and tutorials on the in Cydia go along hit subscribe and you'll always get the brand new content as soon as it's released so until next time I'll see you later [Music] you

Channel: INSYDIUM LTD

Views: 40,262

Keywords: MAXON, Cinema, 4D, C4D, X-Particles, xparticles, particles, simulation, cgi, vfx, mograph, motion graphics, motion design, design, cycles, cycles 4d, computer fx, fx, INSYDIUM, digital art, motion, motiongraphics, 3d, 4d, effex, visual fx, software, tutorials, tutorial, tip, hint, help, quicktip, trick, hints

Id: lw5aRCM7k_w

Length: 28min 59sec (1739 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 11 2018