xpReel Tutorials, Procedural Growth - X-Particles - Part 1

[Music] hi I'm Bob Warmsley from in Cydia we make X particles and cycles for D and in this tutorial we're going to be looking at recreating this scene from the X particles reel so we're going to be building this procedural growth system in X particles we're also going to be using an explosion effects sim to add vectors nice dust particles and I'm going to show you how to burn in some really useful color data into our cache which will then be able to use at render time so let's not waste any more time let's get started let's start then by going to our X particles menu and we'll bring in an XP system I'm just going to delete the default emitter that's created so what we want to need to go to generators and under the generators menu we have got cellular automata or cell auto so let's click on that and this brings in our cell auto grid so what we need to do is sell auto needs an emitter and you can actually get the generator to create that emitter for you by hitting this button here so let's just add the emitter and now if we press play we're getting particles I'm just going to change the display of those so they're a bit more clear so I'll change it to circles and there we go so we have our our pattern that has been developed by the cell auto now there's a really good description of exactly how the cell auto works and what it's doing in the help manual faretta particles so to have a look at it just go to any object and there's a little question mark at the bottom of that object if you click on that it opens the manual and here is loads of geeky detail about exactly what is going on under the hood when you're using the cell auto and what all the different modes do and how you manipulate it so it is fantastic reading if you're into it it explains it much better than I can so if you want to know what's going on you go there but we're going to use cell auto in the fault setting which is defused and limited aggregation and that gives us this kind of growth system based on this this grid so what we need to do is a couple of things at the moment it's growing out from the center so let's just we'll reduce this resolution size which will actually make it start to develop much more slowly there we go and we want it to be coming from the bottoms let's pick bottom Center for the seed generation value and there we go so we've got this kind of growth system coming up from the bottom it's only happening over 90 frames at the moment because that's what's set here so let's just change that to 150 so it'll carry on for longer very nice and obviously we don't have any depth to this grid yet it's quite two-dimensional so let's just reduce the x-value of the grid and we'll increase the Z value of the grid and let's just start that again so now we're getting a three dimensional growth system which is looking better all right we can even put that up to 200 frames that's looking nice so what we can do and to speed things up a little we can have more Walker's per frame and we can reduce if it gets too quick we can reduce the Walker steps and for what we want to do this will probably be okay so you can see we've got this really nice growth system which is starting right from the bottom growing up and it's looking it's quite organic but it's a little bit jittery at the moment and what's great about this actually is it that we can do a different random seed and you'll get a completely different growth system prefer the earlier one that started again okay so that's looking good so what we are going to do is how are we going to turn this into something that we can render and make look like coral is we're going to mesh these particles and to do that we're going to use the brand new mesh tool the latest X particles which is the open V DB measure so to get that we go to back to the generators menu and in the pulldown will pick open V DB measure which brings it into our scene not that many settings on the measure but what we do need is to put the source what we want to mesh so that is going to be our emitter so let's drag that into there and by default we get this huge blobby mess and that's because for every particle that this emitter is emitting it's creating a mesh object ten centimeters in radius which is way too big so let's just take that down to two and we'll decrease the voxel size which will give us more polygons in the mesh more detail and let's just press play see how that looks okay so it's kind of building on now it's close to the kind of look that we're after but it doesn't quite look right yet does it and I think we could perhaps go to the emitter and let's just reduce the scale of the particle down to two centimeters and see how that's going to look and that's kind of working I mean we're getting a growth system it's a bit jittery it's not very smooth but we have the start of what we want all right so how do we make this look more smooth well at the moment the mesh is kind of literally clicking on and that is because as the particles are created the mesh is being created and the particles are just appearing at this radius value whereas if we got them to scale up from nothing that mesh is going to start being created more smoothly as well so let's do that so to scale up these particles so they start with zero radius and scale up to two we need to use a modifier so we'll go to the modifiers in the system and we'll go to the control modifier sub menu and in here there will be a scale modifier okay so we'll bring that in and if I press play let's just see what happens automatically so the particles are born and then they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger so let's have a look at why that's happening we'll go into the scale modifier and in the object tab and the parameter to change is the particle radius that's correct that's what we want but the operation is set to change value over time and what it's doing is it's increasing the radius of the particle by 0.2 centimeters every second and that's not what we want interesting effect but it's not what we want so let's change this to set value okay so now we have got the set value radius set to 1 but it's flashing a little bit why is it flashing well the reason that's happening is this if we go back to the emitter to the emission settings the emitter is causing these particles to be born with a radius of 2 centimeters and then immediately the scale modifier is taking over and is resizing them to 1 so that's why we getting this flash the emitters making them 2 and then the scale modifier is bring them down to 1 so if we just go back to the emitter settings and just set this to be 0 now it's just a modifier which is given them the scale of 1 and that flickering is gone so let's increase this to 2 and now we're kind of back to where we were so what's the point in doing it well this is the point we are able to map this radius value onto a particle parameter which sounds much more complicated than it actually is let's go to mapping we're going to add a map and I'm going to select which parameter we're going to map so it's going to be the radius value is what we're mapping and by default it's set to map it to the particle age so let's see what happens yeah so here we go we've got particles which are starting with no radius and gradually getting bigger and what's happening is this when they are 0 frames old which is the left-hand side of this curve we are giving them no radius at all and once their particles have got to 90 frames old which is here they are now whatever value we put in here 2 centimeters so over 90 frames they're growing from 0 to 2 centimeters so they're growing much more slow much too slowly so what we can do is we can just move this across so let's see that should grow on much more quickly now now they are and the growing up coming up to scale and that's looking pretty decent [Music] so mapping is hugely powerful and it's a little bit intimidating at first but once you get your head around exactly what's happening it offers so much more to your toolkit so I would urge you to try and practice and implement mapping in all of your projects because it really is a fantastic feature right so let's activate our open V DB measure again and now hopefully we should have a much smoother growth and that's looking much better tell you what I'm just going to put a bit of color on that let's make it white so you can see it we'll have a look at the subdivisions nd is the shortcut for that and now we have got this mesh that's growing on and it's looking much more organic now we've got those particles fading up all right so that's looking nice good okay so let's just rewind that when it deactivate the measure so the final thing I want to do with these particles is I want to change the color of them and at the moment the color isn't doing anything I mean it's the measure that we're going to render but when we render this with cycles 4d we are able to access particle color to help us with various different effects and one of the effects that we're going to be using in this project requires us to have particles which are change in color so what we want them to do is we want the particles to be born white and then as they get older we want them to fade to black and this information is what we're going to use in cycles to get that kind of gross glowing blue streakiness as the choral makes its way upwards so to do it it's really simple we're going to go to the emitter and we're going to go to the display tab and at the moment it's set to just render as a to be created as a single color this green color so we're going to change that and we're gonna go to gradient parameter and that gives us a gradient which we can adjust and it also gives us a parameter which we can apply the colors to so what I want is I want the particles to be born white and then as they get older I want them to become black and I'm gonna apply this gradient to the age of the particle so young particles will be white older particles will be black let's see what happens so the born white and they're gradually becoming black as they get older all right but we want this to happen much more quickly so let's just crush this and it should start getting black much more quickly now and that's looking good and you can see the effect we're going for it's starting to become more obvious now as the coral growth grows it will glow blue and then it'll leave behind it a hardened coral material so that's looking nice and leave that at that for the time being I think that will do us okay looking good so before we move on let's cache this now so when it comes to render time everything's going to work much more quickly so to cache what we're gonna need to do is go to other objects and in the other objects pulldown menu I'm gonna select a cache object let's just switch on the open leading rusher right so everything's going to cache by default I'm gonna cash it to an internal memory so it'll be contained within the cinema4d file and I'm going to make sure that compressed cache on build is ticked and then we'll click and build cache and this is gonna go through this pretty quickly it's not a heavy scene there's not a massive amount of particles and so it's caching the emitter so all of those particles the size data the color data that position data and it's also caching the open V DB measure so all of those polygon points will be cached which means that we'll get really smooth playback in the viewport and when cycles for D is coming to render the scene that will work much more quickly as well right so we're coming right to the end now up to three and frames and once this is finished we'll be able to scrub through ok so the cache tax turn red which means we've recorded a cache as does the cache object and if I scrub through this now we have got our particles and our measure and we can scrub backwards and forwards and get really nice quick playback and there we go so we have our procedural coral growth system and this is ready for the next stage so let's just minimize that system and now what we're going to do is we're going to prepare our explosion effects which is going to help us add vector particles which will be our scene floaties which will give that really nice kind of submerged water feel to the scene so let's bring in a brand new X particle system just for the explosion effects setup and the infected particles it'll help us keep organized so we'll hit system and let's just rename the ones that we have got so this is our first system which we'll call system Cell auto and in the object I'm just going to disable the icon in viewport just so we haven't got as much busyness going on so in our new system I'm going to rename its system and let's call it e FX and in the object tab again I'll disable the icon in the viewport and I'll change the color so we can differentiate between the two all right good so here's our new system so we need to bring in an explosion effects domain which we're going to simulate an explosion we won't be rendering the explosion but we're gonna use that explosion information to add vet particles which will make them move around in a really nice flowing organic way and these particles are going to be our our dust particles or our floaties so to do that lets go to the dynamics tab and we need to bring in an exploder if X object which is this one here and we bring it into the scene and there we've got our domain now this needs to be an awful lot bigger than the area surrounding our coral so these particles have got enough room to float around the place and the more room they have the more we can kind of apply shallow depth-of-field and they're gonna look really nice in the render so let's make it taller and let's make it come down a bit as well so now this is quite a big domain and you can see this voxel grid at the back which represents the voxel size it's actually it's very tight it's a very small grid which means this is hugely detailed and when you're advective particles you don't need a really high-resolution explosion simulation because you're not rendering it so we can in the solver increase this voxel size by Allah let's put it like right up to 10 and this will probably be okay and it means it will simulate very quickly but it'll also be enough to give us a nice movement to the particles right so what we need to do is we need an object to bring into our scene which is going to emit the smoke and the fire and you can use any object you can use particles for this but what work what's works well for this scene is a cylinder so just let's just bring in a cylinder into the scene and I'm gonna make the saloon that's slightly less big and I'll do about like that and I want to bring the cylinder down to Ward's the where the mesh is originally created which is down here so let's move it down it wants to be slightly underneath for this to work okay and let's just move that on a bit so the cylinder wants to be perhaps slightly smaller radius and the object itself and that that kind of thing will work I mean it's a bit of pushing and pulling going on later on to get these settings right but as a guesstimate this is kind of where we want to be right so that's going to emit our smoke and fire so we need to tell explosion effects that our cylinder is going to be emitting the fuel so we do that with a tag so let's have the cylinder highlighted and we'll go to tags X particles tags library explosion effects tags and an explosion effects source and here is our tag on our objects so now if I press play we have an explosion of sorts we have this fluid moving okay so we want this to push out from the normals of this cylinder and create a really powerful explosion at the moment is just kind of plopping out and then going upwards it's not what we want we want it to blast out like an explosion so to do that we'll go into the tag or we can use this pressure gauge here and don't think you can only stop at 100 we could put this let's just start with a thousand to really push out this fluid let's see what's gonna happen there we go there's much more of an explosion happening but it's continuing to emit this fuel we just want an initial blast and then there be no more smoke and fire so to do that we can keyframe these parameters in the tag so at frame 0 let's keyframe all of those and then at frame I don't know let's just say frame 16 let's put them down to nothing and let's have a go so now we should get an initial blast and then it blows up and Peters out ok good so we're getting there so now let's set up our particles so we want our particles to add vet from the bottom of this domain so let's just hide the cylinder I can use this emitter that was brought in by default and I'm gonna change in the emitter settings in the object tab I'm going to change the emitter plane to plus I which will lie it flat and bring it to the bottom near where the coral starts let's say where's our coral starting from there so we want the emitter to be below the coral let's just say that okay an emitter wants to be a lot bigger that's it so we increase the size and we want this emitter to just emit a kind of finite amount of particles so it will set it to shop mode on frame one so now it'll only emit a thousand particles on frame one and no more which is what we want and we don't need any speed because we're going to get the explosion to move the particles we don't want to give it any initial speed so now if I hit play they just are born and they stay there and they're not moving okay we're getting that so a little bit later on when we're rendering this we want to have some of these particles to be more prominent in the scene than others we want some variation over that color so what we're going to do is we're going to give it some varied and coloring at this point and then we can use that information later on in cycles 4d so instead of giving all of the particles this single color of green I'm going to give it a a random color from a gradient so by default if I hit play some of the particles are blue some are white and some are given random values along this gradient so I don't want it to be blue I want this to be black there's gonna help in cycles and that's just set so it's a blacks white gradient we're going to set it to squares so we can see them right so now we have randomly colored particles from black to white being emitted and they're standing still excellent so now we need to tell these particles you need to be pushed around by this big explosion how do we do that well we go to the explosion effects object and there is an advection tap so we go there we click Add vet particles and we can pass on all of this different data to the particles we can pass on smoke information that burn the temperature values but we don't need any of that in this simulation it's a load of wasted data all we need is the velocity which will tell them how to move around so let's just zero out all the other stuff okay I'm going to hide my explosion object so we're not going to see the explosion and let's see what happens and now the particles are being pulled up by that explosion so it's kind of working but it's not right yet they're not moving enough in in the correct shape so I'm just going to disable the cell auto domain for now just so we can concentrate on these particles so what do we need to do to make this look better well for a start I think we can have this explosion push out even more and to do that we can up this pressure amount so it was a thousand let's try 8,000 let's see if we get more of an explosion all right so that's coming out and that's lifting them so you can see you've got the secondary lift now of particles which is looking really organic that's looking good I think the smoke is rising too quickly it's being emitted and then firing up straight away the car quickly it's going up so let's damp that down and we'll do that by going to the explosion effects object simulation tab and what we're going to do is we're going to reduce gravity which seems a bit counterintuitive but in explosion is gravity setting is kind of a an overall control for all of these buoyancy settings so if I reduce this gravity it means that all of these three are going to have less effect and this is going to mean that this is not going to rise as quickly let's have a look it's rising more slowly now okay very nice but we're not quite getting enough uplift we're getting a bit so I think we could probably risk increasing the width of our cylinder which is our emitter object and I think it's going to involve more particles and now we've got this nice upward movement in a very organic way let's try that again so here we are from this point we've got really nice moving particles which are moving upwards in a really nice way which should follow the mesh as it builds up let's have a look so now the mesh is building and we've got these nice lifts of floaty particles which when we have some nice shallow depth-of-field are gonna look fantastic okay and that'll do and obviously you can spend a lot longer setting up your exposure effects simulation playing with different settings to get exactly the type of particle advection that you want but as you can see very quickly we can get organic moving floaties dust particles using this set set up so it works very well indeed okay so finally before we move on to the rendering stage here let's just bring in will will create a very very simple camera move which will add just a little bit more interest to the scene when we do our final render and basically what we're going to do is let me just disable that what we're going to do is we will be much tighter in on our mesh and I think we'll be in a lower down angle something like this looking up as it grows upwards and I think we might have a camera move that kind of follows up like this as its animating so we'll set that up very quickly and easy using a couple of null objects and then we'll be ready to render so let's bring a camera into the scene and this is going to be our camera and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring in a that's just dolly out a bit so here's our camera at the ankle which we'd like to start and I'm going to bring in a null object which comes into the center of the scene and this is what I'm going to you to control the camera not the camera coordinates so let's call this null object no cam controller mr. nan Khan troller double out right and will make the camera a child of the null so now what we're able to do is I can move the null up and down and it moves the camera okay we're just quite useful so it means that we could look through the camera and if I make sure got my move tool selected and I disabled X and Z now if I drag this I can only move that on the y axis which is it's pretty cool okay so let's hit a keyframe on the camera control and null and we'll the P frame the y coordinate and then we'll move our simulation up to the point where it stops that's just come up my camera and we to drag through to the point where it stops it so it stops growing it about there so we want the camera to be coming to a stop here okay so I'm friend to for two so let's go back inside the camera and I'll move it up to about there and hit another keyframe and now let's see what we've got so it's moving following it up and it comes to a stop that looks quite good I think perhaps delay the start of that move a little so I'm going to go to my timeline you can find your timeline from this window menu so here my keyframes for my cam controller and that first one let's just move it up so it starts on say frame five just to delay the start a little yeah that looks nice good so I'm also going to do is I'm going to add a little bit of rotation and it'll be yeah this one okay so that's just zero that back out to zero and on this frame where did we start we started on frame five so let's put a keyframe here and a keyframe on the final one and let's just move it around a bit which way that that's a nice alert so like this keyframe so now if we set it going as its animating on we've got this nice camera move very cool and that'll probably do simple as that so obviously a simple camera move you could spend more time getting this to look nice but it's a good tip that use a null object to control your camera don't use the camera coordinates here otherwise you can fall into difficulty later down line if you want to make minor or even major adjustments so that's looking quite nice let's switch back on our explosion effects scene and now we can see that we've got these nice floaties floating up with the movement of our growth the mesh is developing and then we've got the ease out to end so in part two we'll take this scene and we're going to render it using cycles for D and B using all of this particle data that we've already put in these particles to help us create the effects that we want don't forget if you want more X particles and cycles for D tutorials please subscribe to the insidious this means you'll get the brand new content as soon as it's released in part 2 of this tutorial we're going to take this scene and we'll move into cycles for D to set up some stunning renders so until next time I'll see you later [Music]

Channel: INSYDIUM LTD

Views: 40,367

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: aCf110U-aBI

Length: 30min 50sec (1850 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 05 2018