Beginners Guide to the Particle System in Blender 3D

1. Introduction: Hello everybody and welcome to the beginner's guide to the particle system. Throughout this course, you will learn all about the particle system and how it works in Blender 2.8 and above. The first couple of sections is an introduction to the particle system and how the different settings and values change the simulation. We will be covering a variety of topics including velocity, collision objects, keyed particles, following a curve, dynamic care just to name a few. There is also a complete section on Boyd particles in Blender. In this section we're gonna go through all of the boyd system and I'll show you exactly how it works. And by the end, we will learn how to create this animation of a school of fish. One of the best ways to learn is to practice it yourself. That is why there are five complete tutorials in which we use the particle system to create different renders and animations. The first one is on grass, will be using the hair particles to create the shape. And then from there we will learn how to create a realistic grasp material. The second tutorial is on fluid particles. After a basic overview, we will jump into Blender and create this animation on screen using the real-time render engine EV. Next up is low poly fired. For this one, we'll be using a trick and the particle system to change the shape as the particle rises. We will also learn about materials and how to change the color over time. Here is the next tutorial that we will tackle in this course. You will learn from scratch how to add hair, style it the way that you want and create a nice material. Finally, the last section of this course is on the smoke simulation and how you can use the particles to emit smoke. The final animation will look something like this. If you're wanting to learn more about the particle system or you are a complete beginner to this topic of this course is for you. So hit that Enrollment button and let's get started. I look forward to seeing what you create. 2. Blender Basics Overview: Hello everyone. In this video we are going to go over the basics of Blender. And so if you are completely new, this is the video for you. I'll be going through step-by-step on the different render engines, the shortcuts that we're going to be using, all of that in this video, right? When you open up Blender, this is the default scene. You have a camera, you have a cube in the middle, and then you have a lamp on the right side. If you ever get stuck on what button I press throughout this course, just look on the bottom right corner and you will see what I press. For example, if I left-click, you can see here it says left mouse and it will also highlight the mouse button on this sign right here. Same for the right-click, same for the middle mouse button. All of that will be displayed at this point. So if you ever get stuck, just look down on the bottom right. Let's first talk about the render engines that Blender has to offer. Over on the right side, there is a lot of different panels. And if we select this one right here, this is called the scene panel. We'll see that our render engine is currently on EV. There are three different render engines that we can pick in Blender, EV, workbench, and cycles. Ev is a real time render engine, and this allows you to actually view a scene in real time. It will calculate the lighting, almost instantly. Display it for you in your rendered view. Workbench, on the other hand, is basically just for modelling and sculpting your object. You don't really use this render engine for rendering because it doesn't really display materials that well. And the last one is Cycles. Cycles is blenders, a physically-based rendering engine. And this will provide very realistic results. It will calculate the lighting all that pretty accurately. Before we get into anything else in Blender, Let's go up to our user preferences and change a couple of settings there. To do this, we can go over to the Edit menu. Down at the bottom, we can go into our preferences. Underneath the key map tab right here. Here is a couple of things that we're going to want to check. First off, we have the selective mouse button right here. You can either select with your left-click or your right-click. In Blender version 2.79 and below, the default was set to right-click. Now with 2.8 and above it is set to left-click as the default. I recommend staying with left-click because that will help you with a lot of other applications outside of Blender. The Spacebar button down here allows you to pick what the spacebar will do. Currently it is on play and that is what I'm going to leave it on. So what happens is if I hit the space bar over here, it's going to play the timeline down at the bottom. Underneath that we have a couple of view options which I'm just going to leave at the defaults. The other thing that we're going to want to change is extra shading pine many items, make sure that is enabled. This will allow you to actually see the different views. So if I exit out of this window and press Z, we can see here we have a couple of different views. Material view is one of the ones that's added when you select the extra shading pie menu items. This will allow you to see what the material looks like without having to render it. We'll go over that in just a little bit. Next up on our list is selecting objects. To select an object that you can left-click on the object that you want to select. In this case, I selected the camera and you can see it's highlighted in that yellow outline. If I select the cube, It's the same thing. And then the lamp up top, it also highlights it. You can select multiple objects by holding the Shift key on your keyboard and selecting it. You'll notice that once we do this, the other selections have an orange outline and not a yellow one. This means that it's not the active object. The active object will be highlighted in the yellow outline, as you can see here with the camera. And if you want to deselect everything, you can hold Alt and then press a to deselect everything. You can also select everything back by hitting a and double tapping a will do the exact same thing. So a to select Alt, a to deselect, or you can press a and then double-tap a2, de-select. Now let's learn about moving around the 3D view. If I hit the middle mouse button on my mouse, I can move around and rotate the view around the object that I have selected. As you can see here, our view is orientated around this cube. Let's say for example, I wanted to orientate my view to the camera. I can select it and hit the period key on my numpad, not the period key on the keyboard, the period key on the numpad. And it will zoom in on the object that we have selected. And now we are rotating our view around the camera instead of the cube. If we select the cube, hit the period key on my number pan, I can zoom in on the cube, and now our view is back to the original. You can also zoom in by using the scroll wheel. Zoom in and zoom out with the scroll wheel. You can also do like a pan or zoom. So if you hold Control middle mouse button to pen backwards, as you can see here, holding the Shift key and middle mouse button will pan the view to the side. If you don't have a middle mouse button, what you can do is go over to the preferences and emulate it by going over to the preferences. Underneath the input tab, you can turn on emulate three button mouse. What this will allow you to do is hold the Alt key and then left-click to Panda view. You can see here it's displaying I'm using my middle mouse, but I'm not. I'm using the Alt key and the left mouse button to actually rotate the view around. So just in case you don't have a middle mouse button, you can turn that on. Since I do have one though, I'm going to leave that off because I find it's much easier with the middle mouse button. Now let's learn about scaling, rotating and moving objects around. To scale an object up, you can press the Esc key on your keyboard to scale it up. As you can see here, it's scaling up my cube. And if you want to see how much you've scaled it up, look on the top left over here on the top-left corner, you can see I've scaled it up five times. You can also set a manual number n. So let's say I wanted to scale the cube up three times. I can hit three on my keyboard, and that will scale it up by three times. And now I can't scale it up anymore even though I'm moving my mouse because we set in a manual number, it's locked to that scale. I can hit the Backspace twice and that will get rid of that selection. And now I can scale it up or down, as you can see here, to rotate an object, you can hit the R key on your keyboard and that will rotate it around as you can see here. And it's going to rotate it depending on the view that you are looking at it. So let's say I move my view over to this angle and I hit R to rotate. You can see it's rotating at that angle. If we go into the front view by pressing one on my number pad, it will put us into this view. And now if we rotate, It's going to be rotating it along this view. So if we rotate it like this, I can go look at the side. You can see it's perfectly rotated along the y-axis. I'm going to press Control Z to undo that. And now let's learn about moving an object. If I press it G, you can move your object around and you can place it anywhere that you want. You can also lock the movement to a certain axis. So let's say I hit G and then y. And you can see here it's locked to the y-axis and I can't move it outside of that if I wanted to move it up and down along the x, which is the red line. I can't do that because it's a locked to the y-axis. I can also backspace that and then hit the X key and you can see it's going to move it along the x now instead of the y. Just like that. And I can also right-click to cancel the movement. What I just did there is I cancel the movement. So if I press R to rotate, I can right-click to cancel that action and it will snap back to its original position. This works with everything. So if I press S to scale, I can right-click and it will snap it back to that original position. This is very useful in case you want to look at a certain part of your scene. I can just move my object out of the way, view what I want to see, and then right-click and it will snap it back to its original position. Now let's learn about the different views we already discussed front view by pressing one on the number pad, it will bring us into the front view. And if we wanted to view the R object on the right side, which is this side over here, I can press a three on my number pad in. It will move me into the side view. Now we're looking at our cube from the side. Let's say I wanted to look at the top view. I can press seven on my number pad and it will view from the top. And we can see our camera is right there. And now we're looking at our object from the top of it. Control 1 on the number pad will bring us to the back view. Now we're looking at the back. Control three will look on the left side. So you can see here, this is the right side. Now this is the left side and we were looking at it from this angle. If you don't have a number pad, what you can do is also emulated by going over to your user preferences. Underneath the input tab, you can enable emulate a numpad. And this will allow you to use the top row of numbers on your keyboard. So let's say I press 1 on the top of my keyboard. I'm now looking in the front view. Same thing for the side view, the top view and all of that. Since I have a number pad though, I'm going to disable this just like that and then exit out to save it. Now let's talk about edit mode. Edit mode is the mode that you're going to be using to model anything in blunder. To access edit mode. You can press Tab on your keyboard, or you can come up to this menu and select Edit Mode. Once we do this, you can see our object has turned into a orange color, and now we can select the different points on our cube. This point that I have selected right here is called a vertex. Every single mesh is consisted of many vertices. As you can see here, with our cube, we have eight different points, four on top and four on the bottom. You can select multiple vertices by holding the Shift key and then selecting them as you can see here. Once I've selected four of them, you can see the inside of that has turned into an orange color. And this means we have a face, select it. Let's talk about the different selection types. Over in the top left corner you can see we are on vertex select mode, which means that I can select the different points. If I switch it over to the edge select mode, I can select the edges instead of the vertices. And then finally, the face select mode will allow you to select an entire phase, as you can see here. You can also extrude faces outward. If I select this top face and press E to extrude, I can extrude it upwards. Now we have basically two cubes on top of each other. Down on the bottom, you will see all of your scene details. And if you don't see this, you can right-click and then enable the scene statistics right there. We can see here we have four vertices out of 12 selected. And then if I press a to select everything, we can see here we had 12 out of 12 selected. You can also see the edges, the faces, and the objects in your scene. This is a pretty useful setting in case you want to check how many objects that you have in your seat. There are many different ways to add objects or delete objects in Blender. To add an object, you can press the shortcut Shift and a, and you can add an a mesh and you can see all of the default meshes right here. Or you can come over to the Edit menu, then click on Mesh, and then add in and mesh over here. So let's say I press Shift a and I add in an icon sphere. From here I can move it over to the left side by pressing G and X and dragging it over. If I want to delete this object, I can press the X key and select Delete. Or you can hit the Delete key on your keyboard or go up to object and then down to delete right here. If I want to undo that and bring that object back, I can press Control Z to bring it back. And this will undo the last action. If I want to redo the action, I can press Control Shift and z and that will redo the action. You can also do this by coming over to the Edit menu and selecting undo or redo right here. So once again it to add an object, you can press Shift a and to delete an object, make sure you have it selected the X key or the delete key or any of the other ways to delete objects. And then you can select it and there it's gone. Now let's talk about the different views. If we come up to the top right, you will see there is four different views, solid view, and that's the one that we have selected wireframe. And this will allow you to see inside of your mesh, as you can see here, it's a now a wireframe. Next to that we have in the material view. So let's say we've added in a new material, it will display exactly what it looks like. And then we also have a rendered view. This will be what it looks like in the final render. When we render out an animation or an image, it calculates the lighting and does everything else. As you can see. You can also press the Z key on your keyboard and switch to the different views. Most of the time, this is how I use it because it's very fast. I can just press Z, go into wire-frame, z go into rendered view, and then material view like that. There's also toggle overlays and toggle x-ray toggle overlays two, we'll get rid of the grid and the outline around the object. So if I select Toggle overlays, it will just display what the model looks like without any of the extra details. If we go back into solid view, we can press Z and then toggle x-ray. And this will allow us to see inside of our mesh. You can see by looking at this view, we can see the ear right there. And then on the other side we can see the eyes. And you can also select the vertices on the opposite side. If, if toggle or relays is turned off, we can't do that. We can only select the faces that are visible. Finally, let's press the Enter key on our keyboard and look at the properties. Here we can see a couple other details, the location of our object. And you can also change this and you will move the object as you can see, the rotation value, the scale value, and the dimensions. The dimensions currently say two by two by two. And we can change it depending on what we type here. We can make a completely flat, stretch it out a little bit, and you can do all of that. Finally, the last thing that we will talk about in this video is the timeline. Down here we have a timeline and this is the amount of frames in our animation. Currently we have 250 frames. Now the default frame rate in Blender is 24. So that means if we play your animation, it's going to travel 24 frames every single seconds. On the bottom right here we have a skip, a forward, and a play option. If we click this button to play it, you can see our timeline is now moving. So if we had any animation data, it would play once we play the timeline. You can also press the spacebar to play it automatically as you can see there. And that is very useful. You can also press Shift and then left arrow or right arrow to skip to the end or the beginning of the timeline, as you can see on the bottom. And then the spacebar to play it once again. You can also add an keyframes. So let's say I added in a keyframe by hitting the I key on my keyboard. And we can add in a keyframe to any of these different properties. Let's say I added it to the location value. What we can do then is drag this upwards and then skip to a different part of the animation and move the queue. If I skip to frame 80, and then I can press G and then x2 move it along. I can move it to this location. Then I can hit the I key one more time and add an another location keyframe. So over 80 frames, it's going to travel from this position to this position that we just added. So what we have to do now is hold Shift Left Arrow to skip to the beginning. Or you can click the backspace button. And then we can hit the space bar to play. And you can see it moves over to that location over 80 frames. So that is basically how animation works. You can also add keyframes, do almost anything in Blender. If you hover over a certain value and had the icky, it will add in a keyframe to that value. So there you go. That is a full basic overview of Blender. I hope this is useful if you're completely new and now that you have a basic understanding of how blender works, let's jump straight into the course. 3. What are Particles?: Hello everyone. I just wanted to make a quick video to describe what particles are and what you can do with them to create different things. Particles are items that get emitted from a certain mesh. Most of the time these are in the thousands. Each particle can be a mesh, a source of light, or really anything that you can think of. There are many different factors that influence the particles, such as lifetime collision objects, force fields, gravity and many more. Dynamic particles can represent Fire, smoke, mist, and other things like this. For example, you can have a fire emit from each particle. There are also fluid particles where the physics will act just like fluid would. You can also create grass and hair using particles will be getting into that in a later section. Any object in blender can have a particle system, and each system can have up to 10 million particles. Certain types of particles such as hair can have up to 10 thousand children particles. So in theory, you can have up to 100 billion particles in one scene. I don't recommend this though because your computer might burst into flames. There are so many ways to use particles, and throughout this course we will cover a lot of them. 4. Hair & Emitter Types: Hello everyone. And in this video we are learning about the particle system. I'll be describing what hair and emitter particles do. First off though, where is the particle system in blender? It can be located over on the right side. It's this menu right here. It looks like a arrow with a couple dots on each end. If I select it, it brings up this menu. Whatever object you have selected, that will be the object that has the particles of stem when you create it. Since I have this cube selected, if I hit the plus sign to create a new particle system. Now this cube has this particle system just like this. If I hit the space bar and now that we've added in this new system, it'll emit particles just like this. These are just the default settings where particles are getting emitted from each face. I'm gonna go ahead and restart the simulation. Now, let's talk about the differences between emitter and hair particles. You'll notice that two of them right here, emitter and hair. The emitter is basically how it sounds. Italy emit particles from the mess that you have selected. If I hit the spacebar again, you will notice all the particles are getting emitted from this face. If we switch from emitter over to hair, this is what it looks like. It's now added these long strands to our object. Now normally with the hair type, you're not gonna have any animation. If I restart this animation and play it, you can see the hair is just staying exactly where it's at. Now if you enable hair dynamics and we'll talk about that in a later video. Now the hair will actually move around. I'm gonna go ahead and uncheck that with the hair particle system. You can turn on advanced. This will give you a lot more options to deal with. A lot of the options between the emitter type and the hair type are very similar. You will see cash velocity of rotation physics render all of these are in the hair as well. So basically, the emitter type will have physics on your particle system. The hair type will be a static simulation. Another cool thing that you can do with particles with the hare is going over to the render tab. I can switch this from render as path to render as object. From here we can select an instant object that we want to duplicate. So if I was depressed shift a and add an a monkey head, I'll drag this over to the right so it's out of the way. I can select my cube and select that object by clicking in this drop-down menu and selecting the Susanne head. Now we have a 1000 Suzanne heads on r cube, as you can see here. So there you go. That is the difference between emitter and hair. In the next video, we will learn how to name our particle system. 5. Naming & Linking the Particle Systems: Now let's talk about naming your particle system. If you're working with a very complex scene with a lot of different objects and a lot of different systems. You wanna make sure you're really organized. If we go over to the particle system Tab and create a new one, there are two menus here, this one and then this one for a lot of people get confused about what the differences between these two. And we will talk about that in this video. This top one is for the slot number and this correlates with the object. If I press shifty on this cube and drag it over to the right, now we have two cubes sharing the same particle system. And you can see this by checking the number next to the name. You can see here it's two. So this means there are two objects with this particle system. The name of the particle system is correlated with this option here. If I select this, I can name it whatever I want. So if I go with particle one and enter, now we can see its name as particle one. If I select this other queue, it shows the same name. The top one is for the slot number. This correlates with each object. For example, if I say cube one, and then if I select this one, we can see here it still has that same name particle settings. So once again, the slot number is for each object. It will change the particle system name for that object and that object only. The actual name of the particle system is right here. If we create a new one, we can see here is created a new particle system. I can select this drop-down menu and you will see the two of them right here. We'll call this one particle two. Now if I select this object, we can create a new particle system dropdown menu and select particle to. Now both of these share the exact same particle system, but they have different names for the slot number. Let's say for example, you want to change this particle system, but you don't want to affect the, the one that's already sharing. Since this object is sharing particle two, you can see here both of these are sharing particle to, let's say I want to change something here, but I don't want it to affect this one. Well, in order to do that, you would need to create a new particle system. We can do this by clicking on this button here. Now it's duplicated this system, but it's changed it to its own. So now this object has particle to, this object has particle to 0.01. so now there are two different particles systems with the exact same settings. Another option that we have here in the name is this shield that looking icon. What this does is it will add an, a fake user, normally in Blender if a material or particle system or anything like that doesn't have a user. Let's say for example, we come over here, we get rid of this material and create a new material. You will notice this material has no users. So what will happen is this material will actually get deleted once we close blender. This saves on space and memory. But what we can do is if we want to save this particle system, even though it doesn't have any users, we can click this button here. In this, we'll save it to this blend file. This means once we close blender and open it back up, this particle system will still be in here without getting deleted. A note, the thing is this option here, and this will just duplicate the particle system. Let's say for example, I change this to 200, once again, are 20. And if I click this plus sign right here, it will just duplicate this particle system and create a new one. If we click on the drop-down menu, we can see two different particles. You will also notice that this particle system now has an F next to it. So now this particle system, once again will not get deleted once we close blunder. There is also a drop-down menu over here next to the plus and the minus key. If I select this, you will see a couple different options here. Duplicate particle system, copy all to selected object, copy active to selected object. This means that we can give all these objects the same particle system by just selecting them all. So what I'm gonna do is hold Shift, select this cube, this tube, this tube, and finally this cube. If I click on this drop-down menu and click on copy active from selected objects and make sure you're selected object is the orange outline, as you can see here are the yellow outline. This is your active object. If I click on copy active to selected objects, now, each of these objects have that same particle system, just like this. So what you had to do before, actually, let's say this one doesn't have a particle system. I can't really add in a particle system here you can see there's no option to add it in. I would have to create a new one. Click on the drop-down menu and then select the one that I actually want it. And this is annoying because it will keep adding particles systems that you don't want. So this way you can just select all of your objects. Select the one that you want that actually has the system last. Click on this button, copy from active, and it will give all of the other objects the same particle system without creating new ones. 6. Emission Settings: Hello everyone and welcome to a new section. This section is all about the settings in the particle system. We'll be going through all of the settings on the right. First off, in this video, we will talk about the emission. In the next couple of videos, we will go through the cache, the velocity rotation, all of these down here. If there is a certain panel that you would like to just focus on, all of those videos are in this section. First off, let's start out with the emission. Most of these settings are pretty easily explain. For example, this number right here controls the number of particles that will be emitted if I hit the space bar with just the default settings, you will notice that this is our particle system. All of the particles are being emitted from this cube. The number of particles is set to 10000. This means that over the frame Start in the frame N, which is 200 frames, 11000 particles will be emitted. If you want all of the particles to be emitted at once, you would set the frame start and the end to the same number. If I set this down to one frame, all the particles will be emitted just like that, one hundred, ten hundred of them. But if I want the 1000 to be spread out, I could set this up to 50. So over 50 frames, 11000 particles will be emitted. As you can see there. Here, I've created a particle system with a bunch of monkey heads. Let's say for example, I don't like where this monkey head is positioned. I can change the seed value in this will give us a random variation, as you can see here. While we're at it, let's talk about the hair length. This value controls the height of the hair, or in this case the size of the objects. So if I bring up the size of the hair length, you will see the objects to get bigger. If I go ahead and get rid of this instant object and switch this back over to a path which has been normal hair. I can change the hair length as well, right here. Currently it's at four meters. If I drag this lower, you can see the hair gets smaller, jumping back over to collection one, let's talk about the lifetime value. This is the lifetime per particle. Once it gets emitted from the match, it will have 50 frames before it gets delete it. You can change this value. Let's try a value of ten. So after ten frames, every single particle will get deleted. So now once I play it, you will see the particles are not lasting long at all before they get deleted. The lifetime randomness gives it a random variation. So it could be eight frames, it could be 12 frames. It just gives it a random variation of the lifetime that you set right here. If I set that up to 25 and bring the lifetime randomness all the way up. And I play this, you will see some of them are getting lower than the others. So this is just a random value. Now let's open up the source and talk about where the particles are being emitted from. Right here we have emit from faces. This is the default setting. This means that the particles will get emitted from every single side or every face on your mesh. If I switch this over to vertices, it'll get emitted from the vertices on your mesh. Since on this cube there are only eight vertices, there are going to be emitted in those spots, as you can see there. If I switch this over to volume. I can press Z and go into wireframes so we can see it a little bit better. We'll restart and play it. And as you can see where the volume of the cube is, that is where the particles are being emitted. They're no longer on the outside. Let's go back over to faces so you can see exactly what's happening. You can see here, it's a little bit hard to see, but they're being emitted from the outside of the mesh. If we switch back over to volume, now they are being emitted from the entire mesh. Right here, I've created a simple scene. This is actually a cube with a subdivision surface, and that is why it looks like a sphere with a Boolean effect. If we go over to the Modifier tab, we can see the particle system is at the bottom of the modifier stack. If we restart the animation and play it, we can see it's not really working. For some reason. The particles are just being emitted from this center point right here. That is because of the modifiers and because the modifier stack is turned off in the particle system, if we turn this on, restart and then play it again, now the particles are being emitted correctly. It's actually taken into account what the modifiers are doing. Another thing to keep in mind is the position of the particle setting modifier. If this is at the top, by dragging up those arrows, we'll go back over to the particle system setting, restart and play it. You'll notice it's actually taking the original mesh, this cube right here, and emitting the particles from that. It's not using the modifier stack. If we turn off the modifier stack like this, where you start and play it, it's doing the same thing. So if you have any modifiers that deform the mesh makes her the particle system modifier is at the bottom, so it actually takes into account those modifiers and accurately displays the system. And finally, we have the distribution. This is where the particles will be displayed on your mesh. To show this, we're gonna switch over to hair. I'm gonna set the number of particles down to 150. So we can see it a little bit better. Right now it's set to jittered. This means that it will try to evenly distribute the particles along your mesh. If we switch this over to random, now it will be in a random position. So if we take a look at this position, you can see there is a lot of empty space along this edge. If we switch this back over to jittered, it'll try to fill in that space. So once again, random will give you a random position and jittered will try to evenly randomized where the particles are on your match. Even distribution is another way to try to even out the particles to show how even distribution works. Let's take a look at this monkey head. We've created a basic particle system with the hair type. Right now, even distribution is turned off. You will see that underneath the eyes there are a lot more particles than on top of the head. This is because even distribution is off. There are more vertices and more geometry in this section. So the particles are being added to this part of the mesh. If we turn on even distribution, it'll try to evenly distribute all of the particles along the mesh. And as you can see here, this looks much better. So there you go. That is all of the settings in the emission. 7. Baking the Cache: Now we move on to the baking cash. Over on the right side here is our cash setting. If we open up this panel, we can see exactly what this is. We can bake in our particle system. Why would you want to do this? Well, there are a couple of reasons why you would want to bake in your simulation. First off, if you have multiple particles systems that interact with each other, you might want to bake in all of the dynamics. Another reason is if you have a fire or smoke or fluid interacting with your particle system, you are going to, once you bake this in. If I hit the space bar on my keyboard, we can see exactly what the system looks like. I've created a basic animation of this UV sphere and move it around, emitting some Ico spheres. Down on the timeline, we have two different things here. This red line is the cache. This is a temporary bake. Over on the right. There is nothing. It's currently empty on the timeline and we would have to play this to bring in the cache. If we change anything in our settings, this will reset the cache. For example, if I bring the number up and then down to 50 thousand, you can see the cash is now reset. So we need to restart the timeline and bake this int. Let's say for example, I wanted to skip over to frame a 140. If we click on this, this actually displays what it is, but sometimes this doesn't work. As you can see here, a frame, a 104, the particles are all gone. So we can't really skip to where we want on the timeline. So in order to fix that, we would have to bake in the simulation. If I click on it, bake, you can see it makes pretty fast. Now we can jump to any frame on the timeline in it, and it will display the particles correctly. You will also notice though, that all of our settings are now grayed out so we can't change what it is. In order to change the settings, we need to delete the bake and then change the setting that we want. So I'm gonna go ahead and delete the bake. Let's talk about these buttons or quick bake. Again, bakes just the simulation in calculate to frame. What this'll do is if I change the setting so it gets rid of the cache. If I jumped to frame 90, I can click on Calculate to frame. And it'll calculate a current cash to that frame number, which is pretty handy in some cases. We can also convert our current cash, which is the red line to this is a temporary bake to an actual bake and it will save it. So if I click on current cash, do bake, it'll convert our cash into a bake. And now we can go through here. And you will also notice the settings are now grayed out. I'm gonna go ahead and free that. And then over here on the right we have delete all bakes bagel dynamics and update to frame bake all dynamics. This will make an every simulation in your scene. So for example, if you have a fire simulation, smoke simulation, something like that, and a couple of particles systems. This'll bake everything all at once. And the button below that will delete all of the bakes in your scene. You can also name this cache. So if you double-click on this, you can name it whatever you want. I'm just gonna go with test. You can also have multiple bakes. So if I click on this plus sign, I can double-click on this and call it test too. But if you have multiple bakes, you can't change any of the emission values, you can change the velocity. So for example, if I bring the velocity of the normal, this'll increase the speed once the particles get emitted. Let's try a value of four. I can go ahead and bake this in. Then I can switch over to test one are the regular test version. Switch this to one, bake this in. And now we had two different bakes, one with a normal value of one. If we switch over to Test two, it will only display one, but it is actually a value of four. So let's go ahead and look at this. If I select the first test, I'll hit the spacebar to play it. We can see this is what it looks like. If we restart, switch over to Test two and play this, you can see the particles are moving a lot more. So this gives you an option to test multiple settings very quickly. From there, I can go ahead and delete both of these bakes. So they know that is the baking cache. And in the next video, we will take a look at the velocity. 8. Particle Velocity: Next up is the velocity panel over here is where you can decide which direction the particle will go in. If you were to turn up this normal value, it will push the particles in the direction of the normal of the object. To see what this is, I'm gonna go into edit mode with this cube and then come over to this panel and turn on at normals along the faces. And I'll bring up the size so you can see it a little bit better. This is the direction of the normals. You will see the blue lines going in all the directions. And this is where the particles would go to if we turn up the normal value. Let's go ahead and test that out. I'm going to set the normals up to a value of four. If we restart the animation and play it, you'll notice all of the particles are going in the direction of the normal. They're shooting out along the face and they're also going up. If I was to set this higher, let's try ten. It will have a lot bigger of an effect. Now once we play it, you can see them like that. Now let's move on to the tangent. This option here allows the particles to go in the direction of the face. If I was to turn this up, let's say three, I'll restart the animation and play it. You can kind of see what's happening. It's basically following along the face. If I come over here, you can see them going along this way. And then up top there going along the top like this, the direction is determined by this tangent phase value. If I was to set this up to one or restart and play it, you can see the particles are actually going in the opposite direction. Let's try a value of 0.5. And you can see them going in this direction. So it pushes the particle along the face of the object. Underneath that we have the Object Align axes. Here is where you can determine if you want the particles to go along a certain axes. We have x, y, and z. Now let's go ahead and test this out. For the simulation. I want the particles to go up and over to the left here. So what I would need to do is set the direction of the z. Let's try four. And then since this is going in the negative x direction, we need to set the negative x2. Let's try negative four as well. So now the particles will end up somewhere around here. Let's go ahead and restart and then play it. And you can see the effect that it's doing. It's pushing the particles up into the left because of the two values that we said over here. Pretty easy to understand. Next up is the object velocity. This is pretty cool. Let's go ahead and test this out. I've created a simple animation where this monkey had shoots across the scene with an object velocity of 0. Let's see what this looks like. I'll restart the animation and play it. And this is what it looks like. You will notice the particles are just moving along with the monkey head and then just falling straight down. In real life, some of the particles will actually shoot out in this direction. That is what the object velocity does. It adds a velocity to the particles in the way that the object moves. If I set this up to one, will restart the animation and play it. This is what it looks like. You will notice some of the particles are actually shooting out along the x axis. You can make this effect even higher if you set it up to a value of three, or restart and play it. And you can see the particles is shoot out in this direction really, really far. That is probably a little bit too much. The randomized value gives you a random variation in the velocity, will restart and then set the random up to one, will play this. And you can see some of the particles are shooting farther than others. It just gives it a random variation, will try even a higher value. Let's go for, and you can see that is the effect. So there you have it. That is the velocity panel. 9. Rotation: Hello everyone. And in this video we are going to look at the rotation panel over in the particle system. Currently it's grayed out and that is because we need to turn on that checkbox. And now we can change the settings. So in order to change what the rotation is, let's go jump over to a new collection and I'll show you exactly how it works. Over in this collection, we have two different objects. We have a cylinder and then we have a plane. Let's go ahead and create a new particle system. And I'm going to switch over to hair. Now, if we switch over to hair, you will notice the rotation panel is gone. The reason for that is because we need to turn on Advanced. Once we do this, it'll give us a lot more options to change how the hair looks. Let's open up the render tab and select to render as path to render as object. And then we'll select this cylinder in are seen as the instant object. So I'm going to click on this button. I'll decide to grab in my pen dropper tool and also like the cylinder. Once we do this, you will see all the cylinders are now on our plane. Now currently they are laying flat on the ground. And normally when you do this, you would want them standing up. So to fix this, we need to turn on rotation and then set the Orient access right here. Currently it's on velocity hair, so it's just the normal rotation. If we select this, you will see a bunch of other options that you can choose from. If we want them to be standing up, we need to select a global y. Once we do this, we can see they're all standing up. So how this works is it takes the axis that you select here and then orientates it to that. So for example, we have the y selected and this phase value controls where it's positioned on the Y and it goes in a circle, so it's going to be rotating like this. If we turn up the phase, you will see them rotating just like this. If we turn up the random, it'll give it a random rotation. For the overall rotation. The randomized phase, we'll give it a random phase amount. If you can remember, the phase is just the rotation along the y. So this will give IT randomness all throughout the right rotation. If I drag this up, you can see the effect that it's doing. If we select this, there are a bunch of others that we can choose from the object. So whatever object rotation you have with this particle, it will display it there. So for example, if I rotate this along the x axis, something like this. So it's at a rotation like that. Let's go ahead and select our particle system, and I'll switch this over to the object x. You might notice that nothing has changed. And the reason for that is because we need to apply the rotation on our object if we select it and then price end. To open up the Properties panel, we can see the rotation of an object is set to negative 57. What we need to do is apply the rotation. So it actually takes into account, if we press control a, we can click on rotation. What this will do is it will set the rotation back to 0, but keep it at an angle like this. Now if we take a look at our objects here, you will see that it's rotated along the same way as this. I went ahead and undid all of that so it gets back to the original position. Now another thing to note is where the particle is located. You will see it's right in the middle of our plane. What if you wanted it to be standing on the plane? Well, in order to do that, we need to select r objects. And you will notice the origin point is in the middle. This is important because this is where it's going to be positioned on the plane. If we go into edit mode, we can press g and Z0 and drag it upwards. And you will notice is going upwards on the plane as well. So now they are standing up. So if you want your objects to be standing up, makes sure the origin point is at the bottom of the object. That's very important. Another option that we have in the rotation is the angular velocity. This is a pretty cool setting. And in order to demonstrate this, let's go ahead and create a new collection and a new particle system. I'm gonna go over to the right and right-click and create a new collection. And then to go to that collection, you can hold Control and then left-click on that little i right there. This will isolate this collection and hide everything else. I'm going to press shift a and add in a plane. And then I'm going to press shift a and add in a cube. I'll move this cube over to the left, and then I'll press S and Z and scale it up along the x-axis and scale it down. So we get a long tube like this. Then I'll select the plane and give it a new particle system. Underneath the render tab, I'm going to select a render as object. And then also like the cube as our instant object. Right now if we play our simulation, this is what it looks like. All of the particles are falling down and they're completely vertical, as you can see here. If we turn on at rotation, we can set the velocity, angular velocity amount up a little bit. And now if I play this, you will see exactly what it does. Now currently you can't really see much of an effect. And the reason for that is because we need to turn on a dynamic. This will allow us to actually give some rotation to the particles as they fall down. So now if we restart play this, you will see there are actually rotating as they're falling down. And the amount that they're rotating is determined right here. So if you want them to be rotating a lot faster, you would turn this up. Let's try 15, will restart and play it. And you can see they're really spinning quite a lot. And then of course you have all the other options as well. We have the global axes right here. Let's select x and see what that looks like. We restart and then play this. You will notice that the particles are actually rotating in this direction along the x axes. It's a little bit hard to see in the video, but that is what's happening. It's rotating in a circle like this. One more example that I'll show in this video is this grid right here with a bunch of monkey heads. Right now the monkey heads are in the middle of our plane and they're not sticking up. What I want is for all of the faces to be looking upwards. And if I were to change the phase value, you can see they're just rotating along the z-axis. Well, in order to fix this, we need to select the Orient access will go with global y. Once we do this, we can change the phase value, but you will also notice is rotating the wrong way. What we have to do next is selected the monkey head, go into edit mode, press R, then x, and then rotate it along this way, 90 degrees. Now if we go out of edit mode, you will notice all of the monkey heads are now facing upwards. We can then move the entire thing up like this. And now we have what I want. The rotation panel is very useful and it allows you to change the rotation of an object pretty easily by just changing a couple of settings. So there you have it, that is the rotation panel. In the next video, we will take a look at the physics. 10. Physics: Next on our list is the physics tab. This gives you the option to change exactly how the particles move and what forces can actually affect them. There are five different physics types. You can change the type by hovering over this menu here and select in which type that you want will be going through each of these individually. This video though will be focused on this first one, new town in or however you say that word. Before we get into that though, let's just discuss it none real quick. And it's basically exactly how it sounds. If we select this, there'll be no physics. If I hit the spacebar to play or simulation, the particles are not moving at all. They're just staying exactly where they are. And after the lifetime hits 50, they disappear. So now let's get into the first setting of the Newtonian physics. Instead of just actually talking about what these settings do, I'm actually going to show exactly how it works. If we jump over to collection at two by hitting two on our keyboard, I've set up a simple scene to demonstrate how the mass works. First off, I'm gonna go into front view and then I'll press Z and go into wireframes so we can see what we're doing. Here. We have two different particle systems. This one on the left has a mass of one. This one on the right has also a massive one. I'm going to switch this one over 210. If I play this simulation, you won't really see much of a difference. They look almost exactly the same. Well, what the mass does, it basically influences the amount of force a force field has on the physics. For example, if I press Shift a and I add in a force field and a wind force field will rotate it this way and then place it over on the left, right here. To actually change the settings of this force field, we need to go over to the Physics tab. I'm going to set this up to two. Now if we restart and play this, you will notice that this one, this particle system with a weight of one kilogram is moving over to the right a lot more. This one with a weight of ten, it doesn't really have an effect because it weighs so much. So that is how the mass influences the particles. These weigh a lot less, so they're getting influenced by the force field a lot more. Multiply mass with size. This deals with random size. So right now if I turn this on, you won't see any of an effect because all of the particles or the exact same size. If we said the scale randomness up a little bit. If we restart N play this, you will see you. The smaller particles, if I zoom in here, are getting influenced by the force fueled a lot more. So multiply mass with size. The smaller the particle is, the less it will wait, just like in real life. Let's move on to the forces next. If we open up this panel, there are three different options here. Brownian at drag and a dampening. I'm going to focus on this particle system first, I'm going to select the force field that delete it, select our particle system and check out what these do. First off, the Brownian, if he can remember what this does with the hair, it basically makes it really random. It does the exact same thing with the particles. If we drag this all the way up to 20, we'll restart the animation and play it again. You can see some of the particles are moving quite fast, but there's not that much of a difference. That's because the weight of it is still quite high. If we bring this down to 0.1.1 kilograms, restart and play it. The particles are flying out in all directions because they weigh almost nothing. Now if we set the Brownian back down to 0. Restart and play it. You can see they're falling straight down. So the Brownian adds a random effect to the particles, as you can see there. Next up is the drag amount, and this is the amount of air drag the particles have. This basically is the density of the air. So if I was to turn it up and play it, you won't really see too much of a difference. That's because the weight is still very high. If we drive the weight all the way down to 0.01, Restart and play it. You can see the particles are moving a lot less, but if we drive the air, drag lower, they move a lot faster. So this is just the density of the air. You turn it up, the particle spool move slowly through the, through the 3D view. I'm going to set the mass back over to one. And now let's talk about the dampening. This is the amount of dampening that has an effect on the particles. It will slow down the simulation. If we play this, turn up the damping, you can see it slows it down. I turned it lower. It speeds it up a turn it all the way up to one and the particles are moving very, very slowly. It basically dampens the effect and the movement of the particles. Next up is the deflection. This deals with collisions on your particles. The first setting that we have here is sized deflect. This basically takes into account the size of your particle and tries to accurately simulate the collisions. Sometimes if your random sizes up a little bit, the particles won't really act correctly. So turning this on, we'll give you more accurate collisions. Die on hit. This basically deals with collision object. If you're particles touch a collision, they will die. To test this, I'm going to press shift a at an a mesh and a plane. If we drag it underneath, skill it up, then go over to the Physics tab and add a collision. And now if we play this with the setting turned on low. So let's go over to the particle system and turn on at dye on hit, Restart and play this. Now you can see all of the particles are dying once they touch the plane. Finally, we have the collision collection option here. This allows you to limit the amount of collisions that are in your seat if you have multiple layers and multiple particles systems all interacting with each other, this is very useful. Currently. If this is turned off, it's going to interact with any collision object in any collection. Let's go ahead and test that out. Right now, we're going to play this animation and you will see both of the particles hit this plane and interact with it. But let's say I wanted this will left one to not interact with this plane. Well, in order to do that, I would have to create a new collection with nothing in it. Then I can go over to the collision collection and select collection three. So now this collection has nothing in it. So these particles will actually go through this, this collision object. Now once we play it, you can see that's exactly what happens. So this can be very useful if you have many different particles systems and you don't want them to interact with each other. Finally, we have the integration. This is the way the physics are calculated. There are four different integrations and you can change which won by selecting this menu. We have mueller, Vr, let midpoint and RK four. Let's go through these one by one. You alert is the one on the left. And basically what this does if there is no dampening on your collision object, every time the particles hit it, that we'll gain a little bit of velocity. Let's go ahead and focus in on this one to demonstrate it. If I hit the space bar, will watch these particles. You can see they end up right here. The next frame, they end up right here. And then finally they end up right here. So they keep gaining more and more velocity each time they hit the collision object. So that is what the user does and basically adds a little bit of velocity each time. Moving on to the Vr, let this one is basically the opposite. If I select my particle system, the integration is currently on VR let, and this one does the exact opposite. If I play it, we'll watch the particles. They end up here and then they end up a little bit lower, and then a little bit lower. And then finally there. So they're losing velocity every single time they hit the collision object. Finally, we have the midpoint. This is the default one in the particle system. If there is no dampening on your collision object, the particles will have the exact same velocity forever. You can see they're ending up right there, and there's still ending up right there. They're not moving up, not moving down there in the exact same spot. Most of the time, midpoint is what you want and that is actually the default in the particle system are k4 is almost exactly like midpoint, except it's a little bit slower and slightly more accurate to the real world. Underneath the integration we have timestep and this is the speed of the simulation. So right now it's on 0.04. If I drag this up a little bit, let's go with that 0.48 and we restart. You will see the particles are going extremely fast. If I bring this lower, like a 0.01, then we'll restart and play it. The particles are moving much, much slower as you can see there. It's just the speed of the simulation. Underneath that we have the sub-frames. This is a pretty important to value right here. Depending on your simulation, you might want to turn it up. Sometimes if you have a very fast moving particle system, the particles will actually go through collision objects. So in order to counteract that, you can turn up the sub-frames. For every one frame, there is a certain amount of calculations done in Blender. If you turn this up to, let's say four, between frame one, frame two, there's going to be four different calculations. This will help smooth out the particle system and get rid of any glitches that you might have. So there you go. That is the physics panel. If you're wanting to learn about keyed Boyd or fluid, there is a section for all of these. 11. Render Panel: Hello everyone. And in this video, we're gonna take a look at the render panel. Here you can designate objects to render as particles. You can select the hair, you can select collections. All that we will discuss in this video. First off, we have the render as you can decide if you want to render your particle as a halo, a lion, a path, object or collection or none if you don't want any particles to show up. Let's go through these one by one and I'll be describing exactly how they work. First off, we have none and that's basically exactly how it sounds. It'll render and nothing in your scene, there's no particles at all. Halo, on the other hand, does show up in the view port. If we play this, you'll see all of these dots. These are halos in 3D space. You can't see them in the render. They are just particles which you can use to influence other types of physics. You might be asking yourself, what's the point of the halo because you can't see it in the render. And I'll show you real quick. If I press F2, you'll see nothing is showing up in the render. Well, what the halo particles allow you to do is influence other types of physics. If you have a fire simulation, you can emit fire from each of these particles, and that will create a very cool simulation. Underneath the halo we have the line option. You won't see any difference between Halo and line. And that is because in Blender version 2.79, there was a render engine called Blender Render. This allowed you to render your particles as lines. You can change the thickness, do all sorts of stuff like that. But in 2.8 they remove this render engine. And so now I don't think the line does anything in blender to 0.8. Path, on the other hand, does do something. If we select it, you won't see anything. But that's because we need to switch over to the hair settings. If we switch over to hair, you will see that this is rendering as a path. And each of these are just a single path of hair, just like this. Into these settings, we have B spline and the step value, this controls the quality of the hair. Since the hair is straight, you won't notice anything. So let's turn on hair dynamics and then restart and play it. So we actually have some physics for the hair. If we zoom in here, you'll notice that there is a line and there's three different steps to this, to this hair. And it doesn't look that high-quality, it's not very smooth. So in order to fix the smoothness, we would turn on BS1 and bring this steps up a little bit. If we go over to five, and I'll position the camera right here just for demonstration purposes. Now with the render engine EP, you won't really see much of a difference. And that is because we need to switch over to cycles. So if I go over to the render tab and I switched the render engine over two cycles. Now you'll notice the line is a lot more smooth as you can see here. The last two settings that we have here is object and collection. We already know about object. Basically, you can just pick an object to render your particles with. I'm going to press shift a and add an a torus and I'll move it over to the side. Also allows my default cube, but go for the instant object, select the torus. So now we have a 1000 horses that are being emitted from this cube. As you can see there. There are three different options underneath the instant object, global coordinates. This will change the coordinates from the cube over to the actual object. So now this object is emitting particles instead of the cute, the object rotation. If I turn this on, I select my Taurus and rotate it. You will also notice the particles are rotating with it as well. Same thing for the scale. If you turn on the scale scalar particle up, it'll also scale the particles for the default cube. The scale and scale randomness. These are very easy to understand. This controls the scale of the particles with this value, and then the randomness will bring it up. And you can see now all of the particles have a bit of randomness to their size. And this gives you some variation for your particle system. If these show emitter button is turned on at this means your object that is emitting the particles will show up in the render. If this is turned off, the cube will not show up and it will only be the particles. So let's play it a little bit. I'll position the camera right about here. And then I'll render this out into an image. If we press F2, you will notice the cube is gone and it's only showing that the particles. One more panel that we have here before we move on to the collection is the extra menu. Here we can deal with parent particles on borne particles and dead particles. What this allows you to do with the parent particles is if we enable children, instead it over a two, simple. What is happening is for each particle there is a display amount of ten. There's going to be ten tourists is for one tourist on each of the particles. If I turn the parent particle on, it will actually render the parent one as well. Because currently if this is turned off, that means the torus that is the parent will not be rendered. But if this is turned on, then it will render that parent particle. The unborn option here allows you to see the particles that have not been born yet. Since that we have in the emission, the end frame and start frame is 1200. There are some particles that have not been born. They will be born after a reaches to a 100. But if we turn this on, it will display all of the particles right there until they're all get emitted this in create some very interesting effects. And finally, for the dead option here, if we scroll back to the emission, you will notice the lifetime is set to 250. So after 50 frames, the particle will disappear. But if the option here for dead is turned on, this means the particles will never die. They will just continue staying in the 3D space. Let's go ahead and test that out by switching the lifetime over to five frames. So if this is turned off, the particle will disappear very quickly. If this is turned on, will play this and you will see they stop where they are at and just remain visible even though they are dead. This can also create some very interesting results. Finally, we have the render as collection. Here you can add in your own collection and have different objects in that collection. And then it will randomly pick between those objects and displayed on your particle system. To test that out, I'm going to right-click and create a new collection. And then to go to that collection, hit too on your keyboard. I'm going to add in a cube. And then I will add an, a, a monkey head right here. I'll add in a UV sphere. And then finally, let's go with a cylinder. So now we have four different objects in this collection. If we go back to collection one, select our plane, I'll scale it up as well. And then for the instant collection, will need to select the one that we just created, which is collection too. So in the drop-down menu, I'll select collection to. I'm going to bring the size lower so we can see exactly what's happening. You will see there is all sorts of different objects around our plane. They are very random and sporadic and is picking randomly between them. If I click on a whole collection, it'll actually display the entire collection as one particle, as you can see here. If you turn on a pick random, it will randomly pick them. It won't be evenly distributed like it is currently. I think at the moment, they are evenly distributed like there's a certain amount of cube, certain amount of monkey heads. If this is turned on, it'll just be random. If I turn on a global coordinates, it will actually grab the coordinates of those objects such as the cube and display them in the correct spot. If I turn on an object rotation, it will also follow the rotation of the objects in collection to, so if I go to that collection, I can select the cylinder rotated and you will see the rotation of the cylinders on the plane as well. Objects scale does the exact same thing as the object one. So if I select them, I can scale it up. It's also scaling up the particles. If you want more control over how many objects are on your plane, you can click on it, use count. If we open up this panel, you can select the number of cubes that you want, the number of monkey heads, you want spheres and cylinders. So if I set the account up to like at ten or so, that you can see that it's prioritizing the cubes a lot more than the monkey heads. If I select the Suzanne and I set this to 0, it's going to display 0 of the Susanne heads and mostly just the cubes. So you can prioritize how many objects that you want with these values here. Render as collection is very useful, especially for nature scenes, where you need to make sure everything looks organic and random. Using a collection is very useful. So there you have it. That is the render panel. In the next video, we will discuss the viewport display. 12. Viewport Display: Next up is the viewport display. Underneath the render panel we have the viewport display, and in the title you can see it's only going to affect the viewport itself. It does not affect the render at all. The first option that we have here is the display ads. You can decide to display it as a point which is the halo. You can decide to display it as what the render we'll see. So for example, if you have a render as halo to reenergize object. And then if we use the ecosphere, we can see the ICA sphere in our particle system. But if we switch the display as over 2 is going to switch it back over to those halos, as you can see here. Now again, if we were to render this, you wanna see the halos. You would see the ecosphere is because again, this is only for the viewport. You have a couple of different options here. You can render it as a circle or a cross or a axes, just like this. And the reason this is here is to help the viewport runs smoothly. For example, if I go over to collection to, I have a huge plane with 50 thousand cylinders. Now, it might be hard to see, but in the viewport it's kind of slowing down my view, it's hard to see. So what I can do is actually click on display as rendered to display as path. And now I can move smoothly around my viewport. Once we do a render though, the cylinders will still show up. If you want to see the cylinders, but you don't want to display all of them at once. You can turn the amount down. So if I drag this down to, let's say 10%, it will only display 10% of the cylinders. And once again, my viewport is now very smooth and I can move around perfectly fine. This is very useful as well, especially for big particle systems where there is a lot of objects. The display down at to smooth out your viewport. Jumping back over to collection one, we're going to set the display over 2. And then for the color, we can select a different thing right here, velocity or acceleration. And a velocity will display the velocity of each particle, where the red is, That means it's moving very fast. To actually see this better, we can turn up the fade distance if we go up to like six or so. Now you can see that where the blue is, they're not moving that much and where the red is, they are speeding up. This is very handy, especially in materials because you can actually grab the velocity of each particle and influence the color. The size, amount controls the size of the particles. So if I drag this up, the halos become bigger just like that. And on the last option that we have here is show emitter. This is the exact same thing as show emitter and the render except in the viewport. So if you don't want your object to show up in the viewport, turn off, Show emitter, and now only the particles will show up. This is also very useful for navigating your scene. 13. Field Weight & Force Field Settings: Now let's get into the field weights. This panel allows you to control which force fields are interacting with which particle system. And I'll show you exactly how it works right now. First off, the first setting that we have here is gravity, and you can probably guess what it already does if I turn it all the way down and we restart and play it, there is no gravity in our scene and all of the particles are just getting emitted off to the sides. Just like that. If we turn it all the way up and play it, now the particles have gravity and they start to fall down. The next value that we have here is all, and this controls all of the forces underneath. So for example, if we add in a wind of force fields, so if I press Shift eight, go to force field and then we add in a wind force field. I'll go into front view, rotate this so it's 90 degrees like this. And over in at the physics panel, we can control the strength of this force field. Let's go through these settings real quick. The strength right here controls the strength of the wind. So if I bring this up, it will actually expand an OB, a stronger effect, the flow value basically it adds a flow to the particles, so it will slow down the speed of the strength. The flow value basically takes the string value and just slows it down. So if I was to drag this up and we play it, you can see they're going really fast off to the right side. But if I bring the flow up a little bit, they will start to slow down. It still has the same strength. It's still going at the same angle issues moving a lot slower. That's basically what the flow does. I'm going to bring that back down to one. The noise amount controls how much noise is in your wind force field. So if you shorten this up, there'll be a lot more randomness. It's a little bit hard to see right now, but it's basically taking a constant wind and giving that some variation. I'm gonna bring back back down to 0. And then of course, the c value just gives you a slight variation between the different wind force fields. Jumping back over to the particle system, let's go to the Particle System tab. And if we turn the all, all the way down to 0, there will be no effect on any of the force fields. Once we play this, you can see the particles are just falling straight down. If we drag it up, now the wind has an effect. We can also determine individual force fields and how much in effect they will have. So for example, this wind option here, turn it down, it falls down. But if we were to select our force field and switch it over to a different type of force field. So if we come over to the type and switch it over to like a force, it turns it into a circle. And since the particle system, the force is still at one, this will have an effect, as you can see there. But if the force is turned off. So basically you can control which force fields interact with your particle system. The effector group also gives you more control. So let's say you have a lot of collections with multiple force fields, multiple particle systems, and you don't want them interacting with each other. You can do that right here. I'm going to select my force field right here. I'm going to press M and move it to a new collection, Collection two. Now if I select my particle system and underneath the effector collection, I'm going to select collection one, which has no force fields in it. So now once we play this, this force field does not have an effect because it's not in collection one. If we then add a force field to collection one, I'll rotate it around this way and play it will bring up the string so we can see it. Now this one has an effect because it is in collection one underneath the field to eight. So we have the force field settings here. You can have the particles actually be a force field itself. So if I played this real quick, we can have every single particle and this particle system be a force field. If we open up the type panel and change it to whatever force field that we want. Let's go with wind for example, the strength value we can set here. So if I bring this up to, let's say four or five and then we restart and play it. You won't see too much of a difference. And that's because self effect is turned off. If we turn this on, now, each of these particles will have their own individual force. Now you can see they're just flying off in that direction. The effector amount controls how many particles will actually have a force field. So depending on your number right here. So if we have 1000 particles here, let's say ten of those particles will actually have a wind force field for restart and play it. You can see some of them are pushing off to the side. Only ten of the particles actually have an effect though. Then of course we have all the different settings, just like in the force field we have flow, the noise, the seed amount, and all of that. You can also have multiple types. So under here, if you want to add an another type of force field, let's go with a turbulence force field or bring the strength up to five, restart and play it. And now we can see we have multiple force fields interacting with this particle system. Another cool thing that you can do is if you have multiple particles systems on one object, you can have one of those systems actually effect the other one with the force field settings down here. So right now I have this first one selected. And if we play this, this is what it looks like. I've set up one to be the halo and one to be the circle. So you can see the differences over in the Force Field Settings. I'm going to select the first particle system and turn the type over to a wind force field. And the strength of this, we'll go with three. So now if we restart and play it, you can see this particle system is actually affecting the one over here. And it's pushing all of those particles off to the side. If we turn on selfless acts, of course it will actually affect the other particles as well and they'll all just fly in that direction. Pretty cool. This also works for other objects as well. So if I add an another cube and then I hit the plus sign, and then we just restart and play this. You can see this particle system is also shooting out in this direction from these wind particles over here. So there you go. That is the force field settings and the field weights. 14. Vertex Groups: Now let's talk about the vertex group. This allows you to customize where the particles are on your mesh, the length of the clumped value, the kink and all of these other values right here. Let's go ahead and get into it. To actually add in a vertex u, we need to go over to the object data panel, which is this triangle. Over here we have the vertex group. We can hit the plus sign and name the group by double-clicking on it. How this works is it deals with white paint. To actually access the weight Paint mode, we need to go over to object down to weight paint with a weight of one. And this means it's going to be 100%. And if we click on the plane, you will see nothing happens. That's because if we go into edit mode, we only have four vertices for this plane. And the vertex group in the white paint actually deals with geometry. So we need to add in more vertices to our plane. If we right-click and sub-divide, we can open up the sub-divide panel and set the number of cuts. Let's try 25. And there we go. We see a lot more geometry. Let's go even higher. Let's try 50 cuts. And I think that's pretty good. From there we can go back over to weight Paint mode. Now if we come up and make sure the weight is set up to one, you can also press the f key to bring your brush smaller or bigger. You can start painting on the plane. Just like that. So now with this data, we can paint in where we want our particles to be. So let's say I wanted there to be a big spot in the middle, but I don't want the particles to be on the outside. So with that done, we can go back into object mode, then jump back over to the particle system. The density controls the density of the particles. So if we select the group that we just created, the particles will be limited to that spot. Now with the weight pain and deals from a value of 0 to one. So that means blue is 0 and red is one. So let's go back into weight paint so you can see it and where the green is, that's about 50%. So some of the particles will be there, but they're mostly going to be focused where the red is. You can also do this in real time. So if I start painting, the particles come back into our plane. There's also other options that we have here such as length. So if we liked the group that we just created, you'll notice on the edges, the hair is actually smaller. And you can create some really cool things with this. For example, if we go back into weight Paint mode, we can select the gradient tool. I'm going to go into top view to demonstrate this, we select the gradients. We can actually click and drag and create a gradient effect. Right now though, since we painted over top of this, it's not going to work. So let's bring the way, all the way to 0. Selected the brush tool than F to bring it up and just paint the entire thing blue. And now with that done, we can bring the weight backup to one, select the gradient tool, click and drag to create a gradient. And you can see here it starts out very tall and then gets smaller as it gets darker into the blue area. The clumped value deals with the children particles. Currently though we don't have any. So let's go ahead and open up the children section and churn on it's simple. So basically how the children works is it takes one particle and adds the amount that you set right here. Currently the display amount is set to ten. So for every one particle, there'll be ten particles. Underneath the Colombian value. If we bring the clumping up a little bit, you'll notice that they kind of clumped together at the top. We can actually take that clump value and plug it into the clump section over here. So if we select that group only where there is red, that will be where the clumping is. So over here where it's like orange or yellow, I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of the density as well. You'll notice they're not getting clumped up. Let's also get rid of the links that we can see it a little bit better. So over here there's no clumping. And then over here there is some. This also works for the kink, the roughness and the roughness n, and all of these deal with the children. So underneath the roughness, if I bring the Uniform up a little bit and then I select the roughness in the vertex group. You'll notice this side has the roughness, but this side does not. So there you go. That is how vertex groups work. If you want to learn more about the density and why that's important to go ahead and check out the grass section in this course. 15. Texture in the Particle System: The last section that we have here in the particle system is the texture panel. This allows you to customize the size, the general time where their position on the mesh and a lot of other things. So over in the texture panel, we need to create a new texture by clicking this new button right here. And as you can see, it created a new texture. To actually go to this texture, we need to click on the texture panel. And here we can see what our texture looks like. You can use an image or you can use the procedural textures that blender has to offer. Let's go with the blend for demonstration purposes. If we play this, you'll notice that it's doing a couple of weird things. It's actually getting emitted across the mesh as you can see here. So basically what's happening if we open up the influence tab, we can see general time is turned on. If we turn this off and enable size. Now, if we restart and play this, you'll notice the particles on the left are very small and the particles on the right are big because of the gradient texture that we have here. Pretty cool. Another thing that you can do is actually change the position of the gradient if we scroll down underneath the coordinates instead it for him and generated over to strand particle. What this'll do is it will actually give an effect of particles growing as they drop. To see this a little bit better, let's go back over to the particle system and bring the gravity down a little bit. So if we open up the field weights will bring the gravity to about 0.3. Restart and play it. And you can see the particles are actually growing as they fall down. So that's pretty cool. There is a couple other cool things that you can do as well. So if you turn off the size and turn on a gravity or restart and play it, it kinda gives it a floating effect and then the particles start to fall down. If we'd bring gravity all the way back up to one Restart and planet, you can see this sort of effect. So they kind of float out and then gravity turns on and they fall down. All of these values here, the general time lifetime density size, all of these can be influenced as a texture for the particle system. The bottom values here deal with hair particles. So if you can remember in the last video where we did the vertex group with the clump and the twist. That's basically the same thing with the texture. It'll just display the hair particles where the texture is underneath the mapping. You can change the location of the texture with these offset values and the size of them. You can also come up here and switch it over to, let's go with clouds. And if we open up the colors panel, we can change the brightness and the contrast of the texture. So if we bring the contrast all the way up to five, you'll notice it looks like this. So now if we uncheck this, let's actually create a new particle system. I'll scale up the plane, go over to the particle system tab, Create a new one. I'll switch it over to hair. Then underneath the texture will select the texture that we've created. So it's this one right here. Then if we go back over to the texture panel, turn off time and then select the density, will go on to top view so you can see it a little bit better where there is blackness, there is no particles and where there is white, there is particles. So it's just another way to display the density with a texture. Then of course, if you don't like outlooks, you can set the offset up a little bit. So if I go up to ten, it gives us a random spot on the texture. You can change the size of it as well. So if I drag up or down at the size, if we go all the way up a little bit, something like this, we might need to refresh it by unchecking it and checking it again. As you can see, it now refreshed and it looks like this. So there you go. That is how the texture is work and you can do a lot of cool stuff. And I suggest you go play around with it yourself and test out some of the cool things that you can do. 16. Collision Objects: Now let's get into collisions. Collision objects allow the particles to actually interact with a mesh. Right now I have a plane set up. And if I play the simulation, you will notice all of the particles are actually passing through the plane. Well, in order to get them to collide with it, we need to select the plane. Go over to the Physics tab. If we click on collision, and then we restart the animation and play it one more time. You will notice the particles are actually colliding with the plane like this and bouncing up over in the settings in the collision object, we have two different panels. We have the particle and the soft body and cloth. This one is for you probably guessed it, the soft body and the cloth simulation. We don't need to worry about that for the particle, so we can go ahead and close that off. There are a couple of different settings and values that we can tweak on the collision object to change how the particles interact. First off, we have this top value and this basically controls if the particles will be able to pass through the collision. If it's all the way up, every single particle will pass through, as you can see there, if it's about halfway r. So let's go point for only about 40% of the particles will actually pass through. As you can see, the rest of them are bouncing upwards. So this is just a percentage of the particles that we'll be able to pass through. I'm going to set that back down to 0. The stickiness is just how it sounds. It's the stickiness of the plane. So if we restart, turn the stickiness up to eight and we play this, you'll notice the particles are now not bouncing in the plane and spreading outwards. Kill particles will kill all the particles that touch it. So if we turn that on, restart and play this, they are dying instantly once they touch the plane. The dampening and the friction values it probably what you're going to change the most. The dampening controls the bounciness of the particles. Right now once we play this, you can see they're bouncing up pretty high. If we turn the dampening all the way up to, let's say 0.8 or so. Restart and play it. You can see they're bouncing a little bit, but they're not bouncing as high as before. So this dampens the effect of the bounciness. We can also give it some randomness as well. So we turn that up, some of the particles will bounce higher. As you can see there. The friction controls how much sliding there'll be on the particles. Right now it's kind of like ice, but if we turn it up, restart and play it, we can see the particles aren't moving as much. They're just kind of chilling right there without sliding around. Then of course we can turn up the randomness and some of the particles will slide around and some of them will stay where they're at. So there you go. That is basically how collision objects work most of the time dampening and friction are the things you're going to change. But you also have these two values up here. 17. Keyed Particles: Hello everyone. And in this video we're gonna take a look at the key particles in the physics tap into physics tab. If we switch the physics type over two keyed, This allows you to do a lot of cool things with particle systems. Basically, you can morph particles into different shapes and animations. And it looks really cool if done right. So let's go ahead and get started with this tutorial. I encourage you to follow along so you can create your own animation. First off, I'm going to delete this default cube and then add in a couple of new objects that we want our particles to morph into. These can be whatever objects that you want. I'm just going to be using the primitive shapes. First off, we'll add in a cube, I'll drag it over to the left. Then I will add an AUB sphere. I will also scale it up slightly. Then finally, we will add in a cone. And then I'll drag this over to the right and scale it up. So here we have three different objects that I want my particles to morph into. The next step is to add a particle system to each of these objects. So we'll select the Cube at first and create a new particle system. The number of particles I'm gonna set to 5 thousand. I'm also going to breast at and go into wireframes so we can see what we're doing. And for the physics type, I'm going to select None because I don't want the particles to move. This is just the base. So our controller, which is gonna be another object, knows exactly where to place the particles. So make sure the physics type is set to None. And a for the start and n, I'm going to set the n21, so they're all being emitted at once. And for the source value, let's set emit from faces to emit from a volume. So it's just the volume of the cube. And another thing that we're gonna do is set the lifetime to 250 frames. This is an important value, so the particles don't disappear halfway through the animation. The next step is to actually apply this same particle system to each of these objects. So I'll select the UV sphere, make sure you hold shift so you can have multiple objects selected, then finally the cube. But lasso, this is our active object that has the lighter orange outline. Then I will hit Control L and apply them modifier. So now each of these objects are sharing that same particle system. Now we need a controller and this can be any object just, it just needs to be a mesh. So I'm going to press shift a. We'll just go with a cube. I'll scale it down and drag it backwards. This is just going to be our controller object. So now let's create a new particle system. And we basically need to set up the same values that we set up for this particle system. So for the number, let's go with 5 thousand. For the start and the end frame. I'm going to set that to one and the lifetime to 250. Next up, we're gonna go scroll down to the physics and switch it over to the key to physics. Here we can set up where we want our particles to morph into. First off, we have the mass and then multiply mass with size. And we've already discussed this in a previous video, so I'm gonna go ahead and skip that. We also have loops and it used Jaime. We'll go through those settings in just a second. First off, we need to actually enable these different objects as the relation. So hit that plus sign to create a new relation. And then for the target object, you can select that eyedropper tool. And I'm going to click on the Q. There we go. And next up, we're going to hit that plus sign. This time we're going to select the UV sphere. So for the target object, you can click the drop down menu and select UV sphere. And one more time, hit that plus sign target object. And this time it's going to be the cone. So now if we restart the animation and we hit the spacebar, you will see the particles are actually moving between the different objects. It's a little bit hard to see. So let's actually hide all of these objects just by selecting them and pressing h. And then I'll play this. So it turns into the UV sphere, and then finally it turns into the cone at the end. Another thing to note is the speed of the simulation is determined by the lifetime. So since this is a 252 frame along animation, this animation is going to last 250 frames. You can see it's going pretty slow. Let's try a value of 50 for the lifetime. If we restart and play it, you can see the particles are moving much, much faster. I'm going to set that back up to 250. We also have the loop option here, and this will just Loop the entire animation. So if I bring this up to a value of two and we play our animation, you can see it's moving faster because it needs to Loop. The entire thing gets to the cone, jumps back to the Cube, UV sphere, and then finally the cone once again. And that is to full loop's doing it this way though there's not a lot of control over the timing. So there is an option to change that. I'm going to set the loops back to one and then I'm going to turn on it, use timing. Once we do this, you can see these values here are now available for us to play around with. So how this works is the time and the duration. The time value controls when it will be the full shape of the object. And the duration determines how long it will last as that object. So in this case, the cube, I want it to last for 25 frames. So for the duration, I'm going to set it up to 25. Next up, if we select our UB sphere, we can see here the time and duration are set to 0. So what we needed to do here is a little bit of math. Right now, the duration is set to 25 frames. So at 25 frames, I want it to transition over to the UV sphere. We're going to enable 25 frames for transition time. So for the time where I is the complete sphere, I want it, I want that to be 50. So once again, let me just describe that real quick so you understand it. The duration is lasting for 25 frames. Once it hits 25, it'll transition to the UV sphere. It will have 25 frames for a transition time. And once it reaches frame 50, since we said that here, it'll be the complete UV sphere. For the duration. I'm going to set that up to 25 as well. So now we're up to 75 frames. I'm going to select the cone last and for the time I'm going to set that up to 100. So again 75 and then 25 frames for transition time. And then the duration, we can leave that 0 and that means it will just last the entire animation. Let's go ahead and check this out. We'll restart the animation and play it. Once it reaches 25 frames, it switches just like that and it's become that cone right at the end, at frame 100. So there you go. That is how keyed particles work. Let's go ahead and play that one more time. So you can see it starts as a cube turns into a UV sphere and then finally a cone at the ent. And then for them their edges lasts the entire animation. Very, very cool. Now, not only can you do this with just solid particle systems, you can actually do it with moving particles systems. For this animation, I used a fluid particle system and then we transition from the fluid to a UV sphere up top. So first off, let's create a new collection by right-clicking new collection. And then we'll go to that collection by hitting two on our keyboard. I'm going to add in a cube. I'll scale it up slightly and then I'll press shift a ad in a plane. I'll go into front view and then rotate this plane 90 degrees. So it's along the y axis like this. And then we're going to emit particles. So first off, let's select r cube, go over to the physics have enabled collision. And for the damping aid will drive it up just slightly. Select the plane, go over to the particle system and we're going to create a new one. So hit the plus sign. Then from here, the number of particles, I'm going to set up to 5 thousand. The start and the end frame, I'm going to set up to 100. So over 100 frames is going to emit 5 thousand particles, will restart and play it. And they're embedding in the wrong direction. So I'm just going to rotate the plane all the way around. And there we go, we can see they're actually emitting the same direction. Now underneath the physics, we're going to switch this over to fluid. And it basically that's all we really need to do. Maybe underneath the Advanced tab, we can set the interaction radius up to two. Now if we restart and play this, we can see here we now have fluid particles. Pretty cool. The lifetime is a little bit too short, so let's bring up the lifetime to 250, so the last 250 frames. And then finally, let's go back over to collection one. I'll press Alt H to bring back all of our objects. And then we'll select the UV sphere and move that to collection to by hitting m collection too. We'll go back to that collection by hitting two on the top of our keyboard and drag it upwards. So now we need a controller for our key particles will just press shift a at an a new cube and create a new particle system. Now since this particle system has a start and the end frame, we need to match that. So with this one, we're going to set the start 21 and the n frame to 100. Then of course the number needs to be the same as well. So we'll set that up to 5 thousand. The lifetime we're going to bring up to 250. And then for the physics down here, we're going to select the Keyed particles for the relation. We're going to hit that plus sign. And for this one it's going to be this plane. So we'll select the target object and select the plane. Then we'll hit the plus sign again. And for this one it's going to be the UV sphere. So we'll click on the eye dropper tool and select UV sphere. Before we play our animation, let's set up the US timing option. So I'm going to click Use timing. And for the first keyed particle, we're going to set the duration to last a 150 frames. So over a 150 frames, these particles will act like fluid. Once it reaches a 150, they'll transition to the UV sphere. For the UV sphere, we're going to set the time over here to 175. So over 25 frames there'll be transition time. And then it will last as the vSphere for the rest of the animation. And now if we restart the animation and play this, you should be able to see the particles get moved from here up to the sphere at a 150 frames. So right there they're starting to move and you can see there enveloping the UV sphere. So there you go. That is how key particles work in the particle system. This function is very fun to use and there's a lot of cool things that you can do with it. If you created anything cool from this tutorial, make sure to post it in the discussions. 18. Particles Following a Curve: In this video, I will show you how you can get the particles to follow a curve. It's pretty simple. All we need is a curve object and a emitter. So let's press shift a to add an a curve, we need to go over to the curb and then click on the curve that you want. In this case, I'm going to be using a B curve. If we select it, we can scale it up a little bit, rotated along the x axis by hitting our Then X. And we'll type in at 90 and enter. Then we'll go into front view. From here you can edit the curve to be exactly the shape that you want. So I'm gonna go into edit mode. And with these handles, you can select them by left clicking on them, rotate them around like this. You can also press E to extrude and extruded outwards. And I'll probably do something like this. So we have this curve looking like that. Next up we need a emitter. So I'm going to be using a plane. So I'll press shift a and add in a plane right here. Will rotate this plane at 90 degrees, and then we'll place it over on this side. Next step is to add in the particle system. So we'll go over to the particle system tab and hit the plus sign. If we play this right now you'll notice the particles are going out in that direction. Let's actually rotate the plane so it's facing at the curve. You can see they're just falling straight down. They're not following the curve. Well, in order to get them to follow the curve, we need to select it and go over to the Physics panel. If we enable a force field. And then we play this, you still won't notice much of a difference. That's because we need to change the type from force over to curve guide. Once we select this, we can restart and play it. And you'll notice the particles are now following a curve. The minimum distance, this controls where are the particles will actually be caught in the curve. So if this is very low, the circle is very small. It won't catch as many particles in this case, since it's very close to it, it is catching it. But if this is very small, it's not going to cut some of the particles. The free amount controls if some of the particles will actually get free to from the curb. If we start to play this and drag this up, you'll notice some of the particles are actually just flying off in this direction. If we go even higher there, almost all of them are just falling off. They're not getting caught at all. The falloff power does something pretty similar to the free, except if we turn it up a little bit it slightly and makes it have a falloff or the particles. And so they're not doing the full curve, they're kind of just falling off about this area. If we turn on adaptive, it will actually keep the particles following the curve, but they don't last as long since the lifetime is shorter, it's actually cutting, cutting them off right here. Speaking of lifetime, I'm going to turn off the adaptive and, uh, set the fall off to 0. The lifetime of the particles determine how fast it will travel a lot. Right now, since it's set 250 for every single particle, it'll have 50 frames to travel across. If we select our plane and go over to the particle system Tab and said the lifetime up a little bit. Let's try a 150. Now it will have a 150 frames to travel across. And as you can see, the, they are moving much slower. Doing this method is pretty good if you're looking for a very straight consistent line through your particle on your curve. But if you want a little bit more freedom on how the particle travels along the curve, what you can do is actually select it, go over to the force field setting and change the type from curve guide or R2 force. The shape of it is currently set to point, so it's only going to be a single point in 3D space that will have the force field. If we switch this over to curve, now it will actually be the full curve for the force field. If we restart and play this, we also need to drag the strength up a little bit in the negative direction. You can see there are sort of following the curb but still not really. So in order to fix that, let's select our plane once again. Go over to the particle system. And underneath field weights, I'm going to turn gravity all the way down to 0. Now if we play this, you'll see they're following the curve a lot better, still a little bit weird. So another option that we can do is set the strength of a little bit lower. Let's try negative seven. Will play this. And as you can see, that looks much better now and they're actually following the curve. The flow value will make it so the particles are more closely following the curve as well. So if we drag the flow up a little bit and start to play this, you'll see they're really closely following the curve, just like vat. Probably a value of about 0.2 is pretty good. And from here you get some really interesting results. You want them to go faster, just turn the strength up. Just like that. And using this method, you can create some really cool animations. So there you go. That is how you use particles to follow a curve. Thank you for watching and I will see you in the next section. 19. Hair Dynamics Overview P1: Hemodynamics are super cool and they allow you to actually simulate the hair in real time. You can see in these animations on screen and that the hair is actually moving with the objects moving around, bouncing around. And you're going to learn exactly how to do that in this tutorial. Let's get started by learning about hair dynamics. I'm going to delete the default cube and then add in a UV sphere. For demonstration purposes, you don't have to follow along right now because I'm just going to be showing you what the settings do in just a couple of minutes. We will create a scene together. Over in the particle system. I'm going to create a new one and switch it over to hair. With hair dynamics, what you need to do is turn on this box right here. Once we turn this on, and then if we hit the spacebar to play, you'll notice our hair is falling down. This is also in real time. So if you move my UB sphere round, it'll actually move with the hair, as you can see here. It's a little bit clunky sometimes and it doesn't update as quickly, but it's there for you. Let's go through these settings real quick and I'll be describing exactly what they do. I'm gonna open up all of these. And now let's take a look at these first Settings here. The quality steps controls the quality of the simulation. If your hair is kind of clipping through certain objects, you might want to turn this up. The quality of the collisions does the same thing. So if you have a collision object and your hair is actually colliding through it, try turning up the quality and that will fix that issue. The distance value right here controls the distance from where the hair collides with the collision object. Impulse clamping is a little bit hard to explain, but basically what that does is it tries to avoid any glitches that might happen. Sometimes your hair will clip through a collision object and then glitch out and fly in a certain direction. So turning this up will help prevent any glitches. Then of course we have the collision collection. So if you want to limit the collision objects, you can do that with this value. The vertex mass controls the mass of each single hair strand. If I turn this up, the hair will look like it's very heavy. We'll restart and play this. And you can see already there moving much faster and it's acting a lot more heavy. I'm gonna bring that back down to 0.3. The stiffness is a cool value. This allows you to change how stiff the hair will look. So right now if we play this, you'll notice the hair is very loose and it just falls down. But if we were to bring the stiffness up to, let's say 20, you'll notice they're not moving at all. You can see if I move the UV sphere around, they are very stiff and not bending. The random gives you a random variation of the stiffness. So if I was determined that all the way up to 100%, some of the hair, you'll notice like those strands right there are actually falling down because this has a randomness. The dampening controls the motion of the hair. I'm going to set the stiffness back 2.5. And then for the damping effect, we're going to drag this up a little bit. This will slow down the motion. So now once we restart, you'll notice the hair is falling down a lot slower. If I turn it up even higher, will restart and play it. It's falling even slower. The air drag is very similar to the physics air drag. It just adds a little bit of drag from the air around the particles in your scene. So if I was to bring that up to a value of ten, it will slow down at the hair, as you can see here. If this is lower and there is no air drag, the particles will fall through the air without any issues. Internal friction is the friction between the different hair particles. So if this was up, they might actually collide with each other and gets stuck. So if we play this now, you can see it's actually slowing down quite a bit. I'm going to actually pause right there because I think blender might have just crashed. There we go. We are back now and blender is working fine. So yeah, you might want to be careful with this value because it will really slow down your simulation. Underneath that we have the voxel grid cell, and this is the space of the interaction between the different particles. And then of course we have the density right here. I set this one to the right to 500 and the strength of a 21, there's one on the left is set to 0 and the strength is set to 0. At the moment, I don't think the density does anything to the simulation. Once we've played this, they look almost exactly the same. Now that we have a basic understanding of the hair dynamics, let's create a whole animation using it. I'm gonna create a new blend or seen by hitting Control N and clicking on a general. I'm not going to save this project. Now let's create the animation using hair dynamics. First off, let's do a little bit of modelling to actually create the simulation. What I want is for this cube to actually be stairs. So I'm going to delete the two back of vertices by holding shift, selecting those two back x and delete them. From there, I'll go over to the Modifier tab, click add modifier and E ray. We're gonna leave the factor x at one end, but we're going to set the z to negative one. So now we have stairs that look like this from here, all skill it down and then bring the count up a little bit. Let's go with a value of six. We can also press S and Y and skill it out this way so it's longer. And then as an x and scale it out this way, we'll drag it up along the z axis till it's on other grid floor and drag a backwards. I'll press shift a and add in a plane and scale it up. Position the plane underneath the stairs right about there, looks good, so it's underneath. And then one more object that we're gonna be adding. It's going to be a cube. This is going to stop the Ico sphere from moving along the plane. I'll press S and X skill at along this way, SY and skill at along this way, and drag it up along the z axis. I'm going to press shift day and add in an ecosphere will drive this up and then place it over top of the stairs right about there. Now there are two things that you can do here to actually have gravity effect the ecosphere, you can use the rigid body simulation or the soft body. Rigid body will look very rigid and won't deform the mesh at all. And then the soft body will actually deform it. So what we're gonna do is actually use these soft body. So I'm going to select my ecosphere, go over to the Physics tab and enable soft body. If you want to learn more about the soft body simulation, I have created a course on that exact topic. If we open up the object tab, we can see the friction and the mass. We can leave both of these at the default values. We are going to turn off soft body goal and this will allow gravity to actually take over. Then we're gonna open up the edges tab and changed a couple settings here. The bending controls the amount of bending. If I was to play this right now it would actually pass through the object. So let's go ahead and fix that by selecting the different objects and adding a collision. I'll select the plane right here collision. And then finally the cube collision. Now if we play it, this is what it looks like. The ecosphere just collapses in on itself. So in order to fix that, we need to bring the bending up. Let's go up to a value of one and see what that looks like. Will play this. And you can see now it is keeping its shape and bouncing around. The push and pull values give the ecosphere a little bit more structure. So we're gonna bring both of these up to 0.6. Now if we restart and play it here is our simulation. Now let's work on other particles system. I'll restart the animation and go over to the particle system Tab and create a new one for the type. We're going to set it over it to hair and then the hair length we're gonna drag really low, probably over to a value of about 0.3 or so. I think that's probably good enough for the number of particles. We're going to leave at 100000. We're going to turn on a hair dynamics and then open up this panel. The quality of the simulation, we're going to bring up to a value of ten. So the quality is much better underneath the collisions. We can bring also the quality up here. Let's try a value of four. Underneath of the structure. We can change the stiffness if you want or the hair to be more stiff, you can change it. I like having very loose hair, so we're gonna leave it. What we are going to change is in the render panel, we're going to turn on a B spline and bring the steps up to four. This will help smooth out the hair and make it a lot more realistic. Finally, the last step is to enable children. So we're gonna open up this panel and send it over to simple. And as you can see, we have a lot more hair to work with now. And for these settings here, we're gonna open up the clump value. If we drag an n, you can see they actually clump at the bottom. We're not gonna go too much though, just a slight bit. Let's go with a value of negative 0.1. And that's basically all we really need to do. The render amount is going to display 100 particles for every one particle, and that is what I want. Now that we've set this up, we can bake in our simulation. If we were to play this right now, it would take a long time to simulate. So we're gonna open up the CAS setting and bake this in. Right now, our animation is 250 frames long, but we don't need it to be that long. Let's actually check how long we want it to be. So I'm going to hide the particles so it renders fast, restart and then play this. And let's find an animation of when we want to stop. So probably around there, a 150 is probably good, will restart. Instead, the cast setting over here to 150. Now that we've done that, let's bake this in. I'm going to save our project just in case blender crashes and I will call it hemodynamics. Once you've done that, make sure you scroll up and re-enable the hair particles or it's not going to bake correctly. Then you can scroll down and click on bake. As you can see down here is starting to bake and it is going pretty fast. I'm going to pause the video until it's done. The simulation has finished baking. And now if we hit the spacebar to play it, we can see our particles are moving around and bouncing around on the ecosphere, and it looks pretty cool. There we go. So now all we have to do is set up a quick scene and render this out. 20. Hair Dynamics Overview P2: For this render, We're going to set the end frame to 150. And then we're going to scroll down to the hair shape and change a couple of settings here. First off, the diameter route is what the thickness of the hair is. We're going to be setting this to 0.3. I'm also going to scroll up to the render amount and drag this up to 200 just so we have a little bit more hair to work with in the rendered view. Next up, if we go over to the Render Settings, we're going to we're going to keep it on EV underneath the hair panel. We're going to switch it over to strip and then also bring up the subdivisions to three. Now if we zoom in, we have a lot better looking hair. There we go. That is looking pretty good for the lighting. I'm going to go over to the world settings, set the color of the world to almost a white, something like this. Also light the lamp and arsine and switch it over to a sun lamp. So over in the lamp settings, I'm going to set the strength to three and then switch it to a sun lamp. I'll go into top view and then rotate this, this way so it's facing this sort of angle. And then for the material, for the hair, I'm going to select it, go over to the material tab and create a new one. This is going to be the base color for the ecosphere. And what I want is for it to be like a blue color. Then I will hit the plus sign and this is going to be the hair. I'll create a new material. And since we're using AV, we can't really use the hair info node, but what we can do is change the base color. Let's go with like a purple or a pinkish color, something like this. And to actually see this working, we need to go over to the particle system underneath the render tab, make sure the material is set to material two. And there we go to see what this looks like in the rendered view. I'm going to set the display amount to 200. And that looks much better. Now that we've set this up, we can also select our plane and give this a new material as well. And for this material, all we're gonna do is bring the roughness down to 0.1. Then in the EV settings, I'm going to turn on at screen space reflection, so we get a nice reflection. I'll turn on ambient inclusion. And then underneath the color management, I'll set the look to medium high contrast. There we go. We've now created our scene and for the camera, I'm going to position it right about here. I'll hit Control Alt n 0 to snap the camera, it's a place. You can select it G middle mouse button and drag it backwards. Or restart the animation and just make sure it's in frame o. It looks like it's above the camera, so I'll rotate it like this, draw your back even more. And now if we play it, this is going to simulate very slowly. So I'll just skip to a different frame like that. That looks pretty good. And you can see the ecosphere actually stayed there. But don't worry, it's going to simulate properly once we do the render. I'm happy with this result. Now let's render this out into an animation. Over in the output section, I'm going to set an output of where I want my file to go to. And since we're using AV, we're gonna render this as a movie file because it will go pretty fast. I'm going to click right here and navigate to a folder. Once you have found it, you can give it a name and then click except for the file format, you can use whatever file that you want. I'm gonna go with an MP4, so I'll switch it over to mpeg. Underneath the encoding, I'm going to set it to mp4. And then the output quality we're gonna go with high. If for some reason you skip ahead to, let's say frame 60 and you notice your eye ecosphere is still right there. That's because the soft body physics didn't bake correctly. So what we need to do is actually select our ecosphere, go over to the Physics tab and bacon, this simulation. We're going to set the end frame to 150 in the soft body physics, then click on a bake. You can see down here it's starting to bake and since we're using soft body, it should go very quickly. Now you can see the ecosphere snap to that location. With the ecosphere selected, we can also enable a subdivision surface modifier just to smooth it out. I'll set the views to two and then I'll right-click and go shade Smooth. Now if we restart and play this, the ecosphere should stay with the hair all throughout the animation, just to like that. So there you go. That is the fixed for that issue. From there, all we have to do is render this out. I'm going to save my project one more time. Then go over to render and then click on Render Animation. Thank you for watching this section. If you've created something cool, I would love to see it. So make sure to post it in the discussions or the assignment after this video. That's going to be it. I'll see you in the next section. 21. Boids Physics Overview: Hello everyone and welcome to a new section. In this section we're going to be taking a look at the boys physics in the particle system will be going through all of these settings. And then by the end of this section, we'll be actually creating this scene that you see on screen. We'll learn how to model the fish and then add the physics. So it looks like a whole school of fish moving around in ocean. So to get started with this section, we're going to take a brief overview of the boy system so you get a basic understanding of how it works. First off, we need to go over to the particle system and create a new one. If we scroll down to the Physics tab, you can see the physics type is set on this one right here. We need to switch it down to boids. Then you can see here we have a bunch of different options. We have movement of battle, miscellaneous relation, and the buoyant brain. So now let's go through and I'll give you a basic overview of how this works. Overall, boys tried to avoid collision objects, reach their goals, and then fly away from predators. And this is all according to the boyd brain down at the bottom right here. Here you can set specific rules for the particles to follow. If you click on the plus sign, you can see a bunch of different rules that you can add will be going through every single one of these in detail later, I just want to give a brief overview of how this works. Up at the top you have a movement speed and this controls the movement of the particles. You can set the max speed at the minimum speed, the acceleration of this you can set with these movements. You can also set the particles to fly, have them walk on land or climb objects. So what we're gonna do now is actually move our cube over to the left side. And then I'm going to press Shift a and add an, another object will just add an empty just for demonstration. So I'll go down to empty and then add in a plane axes. I'll move it over to the right and move it up slightly. So now what I want is for the particles to go over to this empty. We can do this very easily by setting a goal for the particles to follow. If we select it, scroll down to the boyd brain, we're going to delete the separate and the flock role and then hit that plus sign and then add in a goal rule right here. So with the golden rule, it allows you to pick an object for the particles to go to, or you can have them fly away from a certain object. For this demonstration, I'm going to select the object, and I'm going to select the empty right here. So now what happens if we restart and then we play our animation? You can see the particles are actually going over to that empty right there. But since the lifetime isn't that long, they're actually died before they reached there. So let's scroll up to the top and then change the lifetime to 250 frames. So now if we restart and then play it, you can see here it goes over to that empty. And if we move this around, it'll actually follow it. Just like this. Underneath the movement, we have a battle option here. You're going to have particles actually fight each other. And how this works is with the relation tap, we need to create a new relation and then select another particle system. So in order to get this to work, I'm going to Shift D this and move it over to the right side. I'm also going to delete the empty. And since this is sharing the same particle system, we need to duplicate it by hitting that the two button right there. So now they're separate particle systems. If we scroll down, we can select the target to be the other particle system. So this object is selected the right object. I want the target to be the left object. And then underneath the mode we can set it over to enemy, will do the same thing for this one. We'll select it, select the target to be this object. And then this one is also going to be set to animate. So now both of these are enemies of each other underneath the boyd brain and we need to actually set a rule. And this rule is going to be the fight rule. So if we add in a new role, we can go underneath the fight option. Then we can select this cube on the right, delete the goal rule, and then add in a new role. And this is going to be the fight as well. Now what happens if we play our animation? You can see the particles are actually going to be fighting each other as you can see here. And then it really starts to slow down. As you can see, the framework is really dropping because there are a lot of particles will be going through the fight option in a later video in more detail. This is just a brief overview. The miscellaneous tab also has to do with the movement. You can set the banking and the pitch and the height amounts, and we'll go through those settings in a later video. But that is basically how the boy's work. You can set rules for the particles to follow. And then you can set the movement up top and you can create some really interesting results. In the next couple of videos, we'll be going through all the settings so you know exactly what they do. 22. Movement Settings: Hello everyone. And in this video we're gonna take a look at the movement in the boys physics particles is done. Underneath the movement. It allows you to change this speed, how fast it accelerates, and all that other options for the movement of the particles. The first three things that we have here are three check boxes and which we can set either that we want the particles do fly around them. We want them to walk on land or climb objects. You can see underneath here that the land is currently grayed out. And the reason for that is because the checkbox for land is not checked. If we turn it on now you can see the land is now visible and we can change the settings. We're going to first go through the flight options and then we'll go over to the land and figure out the rest of the settings. The first option that we have here as max airspeed, this controls the maximum velocity that the particles will have. In this example, I've set a goal for the particles. And then on each of these there are different values. If we play our animation, you can see the one on the bottom is moving very quickly because it has a max speed of 50. The one in the middle is set to 10. The one on the top is set to one. And you can see that one is going to very slow. The Min airspeed is basically a percentage of the max speed. If it's set to 0, it's not going to have much of an effect. But if it's set to a value of about 0.5 or so, the minimum airspeed is going to be 50 percent of what the max airspeed is. If it's at all the way up to one, then that means that every single particle is going to move at the max velocity. In this example, I have a max airspeed of 50. So if I turn the minimum airspeed all the way up to one, every single particle is going to be moving at 50 speed. So now if we restart and play it, you can see everything is moving extremely fast. Now we're going to get into the max error acceleration. This allows the particles to change directions a lot faster. Let's go ahead and test this out by selecting all of the goals on the right side. I'll hit the spacebar to play it, and then I will move the empties over to the left. You can see the particles on the bottom arm switching directions very quickly, but the particles on top or not. The max error Angular Velocity defines how fast a Boyd can switch directions in order to fulfill a role. In this case, if we have a follow the leader or a goal rule, it'll accelerate the particles in order to fill that role if it needs to change directions. Next up is personal space. This is the personal space of each single particle. The higher you set this to, the more than particles will spread out currently with it set to 10. This is the result. And how I'm getting the particles to separate is underneath the rural tab, I have a separate and a flock rule. This means that the particles will copy a neighboring particle movement with the flock and then the separate, we'll separate them outwards. Let's try a higher value. Let's go with a value of 25. If we restart and play it here is the result now, you can see they spread even further out. The landing smoothness deals with collision objects. Basically, what this is going to do is slow down the particles as it reaches a surface. In order to actually change this, we need to click Allow land. Once we do this, we can change the landing smoothness. Let's go ahead and test this out with these three different values. If we play our animation, you can see the one on the right is slowing down a lot more before it hits the collision object. The one on the left is moving constantly very fast and then it hits it without slowing down. Next up is all of the land options. And again, to enable the land, you need to make sure that the allow land checkbox is enabled. If this is off, you can't change any of the settings. So make sure you turn that on. Here we have a couple of the same settings. We have a max speed. This one has changed, which we'll discuss in a minute. Max acceleration, angular and personal space. Since we've already just covered those, we're going to skip those. But we are going to talk about the jump speed and the land stick force. The jump speed allows the particles to actually jump to reach a certain goal. In this example, I have it set to 5.5 and you can see there are jumping in order to touch this goal up the top. If we set the jump height even higher, let's go with a value of 10, will restart and then we'll play this. And you can see they're already starting to jump in order to reach that goal. And finally, we have the Landsat stick force. This determines how strong a force field must be to actually affect the particles. In this example, you can see the force field has a strength of three. If the landscape Force has also a strength of three, the particles will not move. Once you set the landforms that a little bit lower it to a value of about one r. So they will move because of the force field is now stronger than the land stick force. Sometimes this acts a little bit weird and the particles move even though the land stick force is higher. So I'm not exactly sure if that is a bug or that's how it's supposed to work. And finally, we have a collision collection, and this limits the amount of collision objects to that collection that you select to right here. In this example we can see we're on landing smoothness, but if we switch it over to a different collection, Let's go with jumps speed, for example. Now what happens is it's going to completely ignore this collision object and just go right through it, as you can see right here. But if we select our particle system and change it over to the landing, smoothness will restart and play it. Here is the results. You can see it gets stuck right there. So there you go. That is the settings for all of them movement. In the next video, we'll take a look at the battling options. 23. Battling Boids: Hello everyone. In this video we're gonna take a look at the boys physics and talking about it. He battled any fight options. You can actually have particles fight each other using the boyd system. And in this video we're gonna go through that right here I have two particles systems. I have a cube on the left and the emission value is set to 100, the lifetime is set to 250. So at last the entire animation and the end frame is 100. Same thing on the right. So now that we know the number of particles that we're dealing with, Let's talk about the battle and the relation and how this all works. We briefly talked about this in the boyd overview, but let's go into a little bit more detail. The battle options on the right allow you to change the healthy strength of the attacks, the aggression accuracy, and all of that. We'll go through those in just a second. But in order to get the boys to actually fight each other, we need to do that in the relations tab. Here, we need to add in a new relation and then set the target of where we want the particles to go. In this case, the target is going to be the cube on the left. So what we're gonna do is click on the eyedropper tool and then select the cube on the left, the mode underneath there's three options, friend, neutral, and enemy. Friend means that the particles will work together. So let's say you have two particle systems and both of them are set to friend, the particles will actually work together. Neutral means that they're not going to find it, but they're not going to be friends either. They're just going to remain neutral. And then enemy of course, is when they're actually going to fight each other. Since I want these particles to fight each other, I'm going to switch this over to enemy. The system right here. Let's say you had multiple particle system. So if I add in a new one, I can set it to fight this particle system rather than the top one. And we can do that by just changing the number right here. But since we only have one, we don't need to worry about that. And then finally, the boyd brain here is where we need to set a fight rule. So if we click on that plus sign, you will see a fine option down at the bottom if we select this and then we play our animation, the boys will actually start to fight. But since we've only had one particle system set up, the boys on the left are not gonna do anything. Let's talk about the three settings down here, fight distance and flee distance. Fight distance means that if they're in a certain range of the particles will actually fight. If we bring this lower to, let's say five, the particles are not going to move because they're not in the fighting distance. But with it's set up to 100, since that's in the distance, they will fight each other. As you can see, same thing with the flu distance. The particles will flee to that distance. All right, so now that we know this, Let's go over to our left. A particle system add in a new relation, set the target to the cube on the right, and then set the mode over to enemy. And then in the boyd brain we're going to add in a new rule, and it's going to be the fight rule. To see this a little bit better, Let's press Shift a and add in an ecosphere will move this over to the left and then add in a cube and move that over to the right. We'll select our particle system, scroll down at to the render tab and switch it over to object. And then in the instance object, select the ecosphere will bring up the size so we can see it a little bit better. And then we'll do the same thing on the right. We'll select it, switch it over to object, select the cube, and then drag up the sides. And now if we play our animation, we can see exactly how this looks. And as you can see, the particles do go towards each other and then they start to find and then they chill around right about there. So in order to make this a little bit more interesting, Let's change up the battle options. Up at the top, there are five options and the first one is health. This is the health that each particle will have. And so if this is lower, they're going to die a lot quicker. In this demonstration, let's set the Health 2.1. Strength is how strong they will attack. So if you have a very high strength, they're going to die quicker. But if you have a lot more health, they're going to last a little bit longer. To talk about the aggression, Let's first demonstrate this. I'm going to select my cube on the left and change the strength over 2.5. So this one on the right has a 0.1.1 and the one on the left has a One Health and then a 0.5 strength. So now what happens if we restart and we play our animation? You'll notice the cubes on the right are actually fleeing. The reason for that is because the aggression is lower. You can see here, boys will fight this times stronger enemy. So in order to get the particles to fight, we need to turn up the aggression. Let's go with a value of 100. So now if we restart and play it, since the aggression is higher, they're actually going to fight. But since they are a lot less stronger than the ICA spheres that are eventually going to flee because they know they're not going to win the battle. Let's go ahead and play this one more time. And you can see the effect. And then you can see the microspheres are killing all of the particles. And then at a certain point the aggression becomes too low and they flee away. Next up is the accuracy, and this is the accuracy of each attack. So the particles will be more accurate if you set this lower, they're not going to hit as much. And then for the range, this is the range of which a Boyd can attack. You can see here on screen that the animation with it set to a very high number, the particles are instantly died, even though they're not even close. So now let's test something. Let's press shift D on this cube and drag it upwards. We're going to create a new particle system so it doesn't affect it. And then in the relation tab, we're going to create a new relation. Set the target do B, the bottom cube, and then set the mode over to friend right here. So now these particles are going to work together. I'm going to set the health a lot higher. Let's go with one. And then we will select the cube on the left, set the health lower. Let's go with 0.1, but set the strength higher. Let's go with a value of one. The cube on the left is a lot stronger but has less health. And the cubes on the right have a lot more health, but they're not as strong, will set the health over to this cube as well. And now we'll play our animation to see exactly how this looks. And as you can see, the particles are fighting, but then at a certain point, the cubes are actually winning the battle, and so the oncospheres will flee from the scene. So there you go. That is basically how it works and you can create some really cool animations. And so now what you can do is add in some materials to both of the particles and create a really cool, interesting result. But there you have it. That is how the boy to fighting works in Blender to 0.9. 24. Misc Tab: Hello everyone. Today we're going to take a look at the miscellaneous tab. There are three settings here, banking, pitch and height. Banking deals with the rotation of the object as it turns. The top one is set to a value of two. And you will see as it turns around, it banks off to the side, the one underneath and set to a value of 0 and it has no banking. It just turns around straight on the z-axis. So again, the bank Ian will rotate the object as it spins around, kind of banking it off to the side as you can see. And then with it set to a value of 0, it's going to have no banking and it's just going to turn along the z-axis. The pitch adds a rotation around these sine vector. This basically means that as the particles turn around and instead of going over the top like they normally would, they're going to actually stay along the side. As you can see, the height option is relative to the particle size. And it seems to add just a little bit of space between the height of each particle. It's very minimal and you can barely see the difference. But here it is. If I play my animation and I'll go into wireframes, you can see it a little bit better. You can see the height is just slightly taller than the one on the right. I've also tested in many different scenarios with this, and it doesn't seem to make too much of a difference between any of the simulations. So normally I would just leave this one the default value. 25. Boid Brain / Rules: Hello everyone. In this video we are going to take a look at the boyd brain. Here is where all the magic happens and you can add rules for the particles to follow. We'll be going through step-by-step on every single one of these rules in detail. The first one that we have here is the golden rule. What this does is allow you to set a goal for the particles to go to or avoid. What we're gonna do is move it over to the left and then add in an empty object. We'll select our goal right here. Scroll down to the boy that brain, add in a new rule and select the goal rule next up underneath the object, if we select any empty that we just added, will restart and play it. And then you can see the particles are going towards that goal right here. If we select the empty and move it around, the particles will follow. Before we talk about anything else, let's talk about the rules. Normally when you add in different roles and multiple rules with one Boyd brain, the particles will try to follow in order. You can set that order with the rule evaluation. The fuzzy option allows you to set a rural fuzziness. This is how strong the particles will follow that rule. If it's all the way up to one, it'll totally follow that rule that is at the top. If it said a little bit lower, the particles may or may not follow that rule because the rule fuzziness is set at a lower value, random. We'll set a random rule for the particles and it doesn't matter which order they are in, it'll just be random. And of course, average will average out all of the priorities for each of the rules. You can also set the rule to follow in the air or on the land. And then there's also a predict options. So let's say your EMT is moving around. The particles will actually predict that movement and go towards that spot. Next up on our list is the avoid rule. This will have the particles avoid the object that you specify right here. If I select the object and it's the empty, we can play our animation. And if I select the empty and move it around, the particles will try to move away from that empty. As you can see. There's also a fear factor. And we can see here in D avoid rural there is a fear factor and this deals with the Boyd and this deals with the boy to force-field. Let's go ahead and delete that and then add in a force field and then a boy that force field right here. And the fear factor, it depends on the strength of the force field. If this is set up to a value of three, will also select the buoyant force to it that we just added. And if we select it, go over to the Physics tab, the strength value is set to one. So since the fear factor is higher than the strength of the boyd force-field, the particles are not going to move away. But if we drag the strength up to, let's say four, since it's now higher than the fear factor, the particles will actually move away from the buoyant force field. The avoid collision rule sets that the particles will actually avoid any collisions that are in their path. If we turn this on, we need to make sure that we select either to avoid different boids or deflectors. In this case, deflectors is what we want to turn on because that is a collision modifier. The look ahead option tells the particles how far they'll look ahead and case there is a collision object in their way. Let's go ahead and turn off the deflectors first and then restart and play it. And here was the result. You'll notice the particles just run and smack straight into the collision object. Now if we turn on avoid deflectors, and now if we play our animation, you'll notice that the particles will move just slightly to try to avoid the collision object. The order of the rows is also important. You can see this is below the gold rule, so we need to make sure that is a bug, so it actually has a stronger effect. Now if we restart and play it, you'll notice that the particles will move a lot further over to the left to try to avoid the collision object. The separate role separates all of the particles just in the air. And this is also correlated with the personal airspace. If we play our animation, you can see they're not really moving that much. But if we were to turn up the personal space, Let's go up to five. We'll restart and play it. And now you can see the particles are moving a lot further away from each other. The block rule will have particles follow each other. So if we turn this on, we can restart and play it. You'll notice that there are particles following each other as you can see. So if there is one particle moving in a certain direction, a neighboring particle will follow that movement. Next up is follow the leader. This is pretty similar to the golden rule. You can select an object in it, the drop-down menu and have it follow that object. If we select this cube, we can select it and move it around. And you can see they are following that cube. As you can see. Underneath, there is a distance slider and this is the distance behind the leaders to follow. Now, I've tested a lot of scenarios and this doesn't seem to make too much of a difference. The line option sets that the particles will follow in order. So if we turn that on and you can set the queue size right here, Let's go up to 100. Now the particles will actually follow in a queue. As you can see, one particle goes, the next particle goes like this. And so on. Average speed gives a average velocity for all the particles. This is based off of the max speed in the movement settings, the speed slider sets the percentage of how fast that will move compared to the max velocity. The wonder option gives the particles a little bit of random velocity in a certain direction. You can see here they're moving around a bit and being a little bit more random. The level is kind of the height for the particles. With it set to 12, the particles will not go as high, but with it's at 200, the particles will move up the z-axis. So it kind of clamps down on that height if you bring it higher. And the last one that we have here is the byte option. And of course we talked about this in the last video. So there you have it, folks, that is all of the rules in the boyd brain. In the next video, we will talk about predators. 26. Boid Force Field: In this video, I wanted to talk about the boyd force field and how it works with the boys physics system. To add this end, go down to your force field and then click on avoids to add it in. If we go over to the Physics tab, you can see all of the default settings that de force field have. You have the strength, the flow, noise, and the seed amount, and you can play around with all of that. But how it works with the boyd physics, if we select our objects here, go over to the particle system and scroll down. There is two ways that you can use the boyd force-field. It's either with the goal or with the avoid a rule right here. With the goal, we can go ahead and delete the object in the empty and then select our boys a force-field. If we then restart and play it, you can see they are getting attracted to this object. It also works if you don't have anything selected for the object in the goal rule, if I delete this, we can restart and play it and nothing will happen until we select our Boyd force-field, go over to the settings and then set this to a negative value. If we set this down to, let's say, negative five, for example, will restart and play it. And now the particles are being attracted to it, even though there is no object set in the particle system down here. So if there is no object set and you have a buoyant force field with a negative value, the particles will be attracted to it. Using the boyd force field also gives you a little bit more control. So let's say I go back over to my strength over here. Let's set this down to negative 0.1 and then we'll restart and play it. You can see they're moving really slow. But if I turn it up right here, going higher in the negative values, the particles will move faster. So this gives you control of how fast the particles will move with the strength value. This is also the same for the avoid roll. If we go back over to our particle system, delete the golden rule, and then add in a Avoid of rural right here. We'll select our Boyd force-field and make sure the fear factor is set to 0. This time, instead of using a negative value, we need to use a positive value. So let's set this up to, let's say point 1, for example, will restart and play it. And you can see the particles are moving away. We can drag this up and they will go faster. So using the buoyancy force field, it gives you just a little bit more control with the gold rule and a D avoid role in the boiler system. 27. Creating a School of Fish P1 - Modeling: Hello everyone. Now that we know exactly how the boyd system works, let's actually create something cool with it. In the next couple of videos, we're going to be actually creating this scene that you see right here. From start to finish, we'll learn how to model the low poly fish at the particle system and some volume metrics to the world and create a really nice animation. To get started, let's first model out the fish. And this is going to be pretty simple because we're just going to be using the default cube. We're going to first go into side view by pressing three on the number pad and then I'm going to rotate it 45 degrees so the point is at the top. So what you can do is hit R on your keyboard and if you hold Control or Command on a Mac, you can snap it to 45 degrees. And just like that, we can also press S and Y and scale it down a little bit. But you might notice some weird scaling issues. So we need to apply the rotation. So I'm going to press Control a and click on rotation. So now if we press S and Y in scale it this way, we can actually scale it the right way. I'm going to scale it down to right about there and then go into front view and finish out the model. We'll go into edit mode and select this face right here. So I'm going to press 32 switch, do the face select mode. I will select this face, go back into front view, drag it out. I'll just a little bit and then press E to extrude and extruded out this way. Then I'll scale this down to 0, so I'll press S, so I'll press S and 0 just like that. So now that we have a point for the face of the fish, and we also want to remove the doubles in that spot because currently there's four vertices in that exact spot. So I'm going to press the M key and click on by distance. And you can see it removed three vertices. Next up, we'll go into the back and select this backbone right here. Go back into front view, press E to Extrude, extrude it out this way. And then I want to scale it up along the z-axis. So I'm going to press S, Z and skill it out this way just a little bit. So we have like a fin. And then I want to scale this part right here a little bit lower. So I'm going to select the vertices selected mode, holding the Alt key or the Option key. You can also select that ring right there. And I'm going to scale this down. So I'm just going to press S to scale it down just like that. And so now we have a low poly fish. There we go. That's basically it. Before we create the particle system, I want to duplicate this a couple times and change the material. So what I'm gonna do is press Shift D and drag it upwards. And then we're gonna do this one more time, Shift D and drag it upwards. I will select the bottom fish, go over to the Material tab. And then for these basic material, I'm going to switch it over to a nice sky blue somewhere around here. So I'll press Z and go into material view so we can actually see what it looks like. And if you don't have the material view, That's because you need to enable it in the preferences. So over at the top, if you go underneath the preferences, underneath the K-map, make sure the extra shading pie menu items is turned on. All right, I think that material looks pretty good, so let's select this middle one and I'm going to duplicate the material. And we can also name this. I'm going to call this one orange. And then of course we're going to change the color over to a nice orange. Somewhere right here. I don't want to go super saturated, but somewhere around here is probably good. Just like a vats, maybe a little bit more red. So I'll turn the hue down just slightly. Not that much, right about if I hold shift, you can do it precise, right about there looks pretty good. And then finally the top one will duplicate the material one more time and we'll call this one just blew. And then for the base color, I'm gonna go with a little bit more of a blue. Somewhere around here, I think is probably good. Then if we'd be for the bottom one, we'll just call this one sky blue just so we have everything organized. I might change the material just slightly on this one though. I'll drag it up just a little bit more. And I think I'm happy with that. So now that we have all of our materials and objects in our scene, I'm going to select them all. Make sure you select them all like that. I'm going to press the M key and move them to a new collection. And we'll call this collection particles. And then we go. And then we can just close that off and then hide it from the view. We're not going to need it anymore. In the next video, we will actually created the particle system. 28. Creating a School of Fish P2 - Particle System: Now that we have our particles made, let's actually create the particle system itself. So to do this, I'm going to press Shift a and add in a UV sphere. This is going to be our object for our particle system. And then over in the particle system tab, I'm going to, I'm going to create a new one. I'm going to leave the type at emitter and the number of particles you can go with how many that you want. I think for this animation, around 500 will look pretty good for the start and the end frame. I don't want particles to be emitted during the animation, so we need them all to come out at the exact same time. So I'm going to set the end frame 21 and the lifetime to 250 so they don't disappear. Next up, let's go over to the Physics tab, change it over to the boys physics. And then underneath the render tab, we're going to select our particles as the actual particles itself. So underneath the render as we're going to select collection. And then for the instant collection, select the particles. And there we go. We now have them in our scene. Let's go into front view and I'm going to scale them up just slightly somewhere around there and then maybe give them a little bit of randomness. So some, some of the fish are bigger and some of them are smaller. Let's see what happens if we play our animation. And you can see this is kinda what it looks like. Not too bad. But now I want the particles to actually move around the scene and act like a school of fish. To do this, we're going to open up the boy that brain. We're going to be actually adding a follow the leader role. So click on that plus sign and then select it. Follow the leader. I want this to be at the top, so make sure it's at the top. And then for the object, we need to add one in. I'm going to press Shift a and add in an empty and then a plane axes will move it over to the left side, somewhere around there. And then we'll select our particle system, scroll back down to the boyd brain, and then select the empty in the drop-down menu. So now what happens if we restart and play it? We can see the particles go over here. We have one problem though, and that is they're all facing the wrong direction. So let's go back over to our particle collection up here. I'm going to enable it. And then I will select all of our particles, this one, this one, and this one. And then we will rotate it. I think we need to rotate it this way. We'll restart and play it and it's still not working. So I think we actually need to do it in edit mode. So I'm going to Control Z that go into edit mode, select them all, and then rotate them this way. So now we're in edit mode while rotating it, and that should fix it. And as you can see, the particles are facing the right direction. Okay, So there we go. I'm going to hide that collection once again. And now let's set up the movement and the separation. So underneath the movement tab, I'm going to set the max airspeed up to a value of 20. I also want all of the particles to move a little bit faster. So I'm going to set the Min speed, the minimum speed, 2.25. The max err acceleration. I do want the particles to turn around pretty quickly. So we're going to set this up to a value of 0.9. And then the personal space right here, I want this to be higher so they're not as bunched together as you can see. So let's set this up to five. Alright. Now let's play our animation and as you can see, it's starting to look pretty good. Let's see what happens if we actually bring the separate above the fall of the leader. Let's see if they separate a little bit more. And as you, and as you can see, they are separating, but it's a little much, so I might actually just leave it below the follow the leader. So now the next step is to actually animate this empty right here so the particles will move around the scene. I want the EMT to stay at this spot for 25 frames. I'm going to skip to frame 25. I'm going to hit the I key and select a location. Next up we're going to go to frame 100, and we're going to drag it on the other side of the UV sphere I and go location one more time. And then finally, we're going to skip all the way to the end of the animation and move it over to the top left, somewhere around here, and then hit I and go location one more time. So now let's see what happens if we play our animation. You can see the particles go that way. And then the particles move around. And it doesn't look that great. So instead we're actually going to delete the flock rule. So let's select the flock rule and just get rid of it. I think that's what's causing all the issues. So now if we do this, you can see the particles are moving a little bit better, but they still look a little bit weird. I think our movement with the empty is a little bit too much. So on frame 25, I'm actually going to move it a little closer and then hit I and add in a location on frame 100. I'm going to move it a little bit closer to the UV Sphere as well at an, another location. And then I think that one is fine. So now let's restart. Can play it. And we can see here is the results. The particles turn around. They go this way. They turn around a little bit more. I think I want them to turn around a slightly more. So I'm going to bring up the max angular velocity and the max acceleration, and let's go up to one. All right, So after playing around with the particle system a little bit, I found a solution that looks a lot better. The first thing that we're gonna do is actually select this back keyframe right here. And we're going to move it to frame is 70 right here. We're also going to jump to this frame and drag it a little bit closer right about there and hit I and go locations. So at ends up at this spot. We're also going to select our particle system, scroll down at two, the personal airspace and set this down to one. And we're also going to select the separate rural and go above the Follow the Leader role. And this makes the particles look a lot better. So now if we restart our simulation and play it, you can see the particles separates and they're moving around and it looks pretty good. And then they come up here. And then at the particle is go over here and then just kinda spin around as you can see. And I think it looks not too bad with a personal airspace of five, it looks just way too big and I think it doesn't look that great as you can see, they spread out a lot. If you want this kind of look, you can set that up. But I'm just going to leave it at one because I think it looks a little bit better. All right, so there we go. We've created the particle system and now in the next video, we will set up the lighting. 29. Creating a School of Fish P3 - Lighting: Now it's on to the lighting. The lighting in the scene is not going to be too complicated. We're first going to select our lamp in our scene and go over to the lamps settings. This lamp right here is going to be a SON lamps. I'm going to switch it over to a son and set the strength down to 1.5, will go into front view and then rotate this a little bit and place it right about there. So and then for the world settings, we're going to go over to the world, set the color. If you want to use the exact color as I am, you can go over to the hex number and this number is going to be 79. See a seat. Just like that. We can see here we have a kind of a light blue color. We're also going to open up the volume tab, select the volume, and then go over to the principle, the volume right here. Using volume for the world gives us a very Ocean look effect. And I think that is going to look very good. Currently though, if we press Z and go into rendered view, everything is just way, way too dense. It doesn't look that great. That's because we need to turn down the density. If we bring this a little bit lower, Let's go point. Let's go 0.03 and then enter. Now we get kind of a better look. The color of this, this is also going to be a blue, so switch it over to kinda of a bluish color somewhere around here are so. And then we're going to add a couple more lamps to our scene. I'll go back into front view, shift D, the sun lamp. And instead of using a sunlight, we're going to be using a spot lamps, so switch it over to a spots. And the power of this needs to be way, way higher. I'm going to set the power up to 8 thousand. There we go and we're going to rotate it this way. Bring down the size somewhere around there are so like that, and then bring up the radius. So we'll drag that up a little bit higher, and then the blend will drag that up as well. So it's a little bit softer, something like that. Alright, then we're going to duplicate this a couple times. So shift D it, we're going to move it over here, rotate it this way. And then we'll do it one more time shift D rotated over here. And then this one is going to be a little bit less. Let's go with 5000. And here is our result. So now if we press Z and toggle overlays, we can see here this is kind of the effect that we're getting. Not too bad. We're going to actually move these up a little bit higher. So we'll select them all, move them up, scale them up a little bit, something like that. And there we go. So now if we kind of cut off that side so you don't see like the start of that small amp. We can see here we kind of have an ocean look. Next up for the API settings. We're gonna go over to the API settings right here. We're going to turn on ambient inclusion, bloom, screen space reflections. And then underneath the color management, I'm going to set the look too high contrast. And as you can see, this is starting to look really good. Also in the volumetric tab, we're going to turn on Volumetric Shadows just so the volume in the scene gives a little bit of shadows. And I think that will look pretty good. From there, we'll set up the camera. I'm going to place the camera right about this angle, will press Control Alt 0 on the number pad to snap it. And if you have a Mac, it's Command Option 0. Then we're going to animate the camera. So we'll drag it back just slightly, somewhere around here. And then we'll hit I and add in a location rotation keyframe. We'll go a little bit this way. We'll rotate it, move it a little bit, place it somewhere around here, then hit I and add in another location rotation. We'll drag it this way, move it over to the right and it doesn't really matter how you place your camera, just kinda move it around, kinda following the particles. Something like this. You can also double-tap, are just like this and you can move it around. And I might drag it closer, somewhere around here, I location rotation. And then finally we'll skip to the last frame. I'll looks like we actually have to play our animation so we get the particles to go in their correct position. So we can see here the particles are moving around. Okay? You can see right there it breaks the simulation, but don't really worry about that because it has a temporary cash. So what we can do is actually go over to the particle system, open up the cache setting, and then bake this in. So now the particles are going to be in their correct position. So we'll skip to the end of the animation. We'll select our camera, rotate it like this, zoom in a little bit. You can press the middle mouse button. You can press a G middle mouse button to zoom in and double-tap are and place it somewhere around. There will probably be good. Then you can hit I and add in another location rotation. So now let's play our entire animation so we can see exactly what our camera looks like. Not too bad. And there we go. That is looking pretty cool. I think I want a little bit more lighting in some of these different spots. If we press Z and toggle overlays, we can see the lighting over here is a little bit boring. So what we can do is go into front view, will actually select one of the lamps, Shift D it, move it over here, maybe kinda rotate it like that. So we get some different lighting somewhere around there. Skip a little bit over here. Maybe we'll grab another one of these lamps. Shift D It, kinda place it over here, rotated around, kinda like this, and then move it this way. There we go. I think that will look pretty good. And finally, the last thing that we need to do is select our particle system. Scroll down to the render settings over here on the render settings and make sure show emitter is turned off. You don't want this UV sphere to show up in the render. So make sure that it's turned off. Now it's time to render out our animation. I'm going to Control S to save my project and then go over to the Render Settings. I'm going to select the file format to be an mpeg. Underneath the encoding, I'm going to set the container to mp4, the output quality I'm gonna go with high. And then make sure you set an output of where you want your frames to go to. I'll select this button here and navigate to a spot. Once you have found your spot, you can give it a name and then click Accept, and then you'll be good to go over in the render settings one more time. I'm going to set the render sampling a little bit lower. Let's go with 40, just so it renders a little bit faster. Save your project one more time, and then go over to your render and then click on Render Animation. Alright, so there you go. That is how you create a school of fish animation using the boys particle system. Thank you very much for watching this part of the section. If you enjoy it or created something yourself, make sure to post it in the assignment after this video. 30. Creating Grass P1 Particle System: Hello everyone and welcome to a new section. This one that is all about creating graphs in the blunder using the particle system. Let's go ahead and get right into this. The first thing that we need to do is actually add in a ground for the particles to be on. You can use whatever you want for this scene, I'm gonna be using a plane. So I'm going to press X and delete the default queue. I'll press shift, and then I'll add in a plane. Now with this plane, we're actually going to add a displacement at modifier to give it some randomness. No ground or no grassy area is completely flat. There's always a little bit of bumps here and there. So let's go ahead and recreate that in blunder. I'm going to scale up this plane right about that size. And then we'll go into edit mode. Currently with only four vertices on each of the corners. It's not going to add any displacement. So we need to add more geometry to the plane. So it actually works correctly. To do this, make sure you have everything selected. Right-click and click on sub-divide. Once we do this, we can open up this panel and set the number of cuts that we want. Currently it's on one, so there's only going to be one cut down the middle. Let's try a value of 25. That looks pretty good to me. And now the next step is to add in that is placement modifier. We can go ahead and go out of edit mode and go over to the Modifier tab, select add modifier, and you will see a displacement modifier right here. Click on that. Now you won't see anything at the moment. That's because we need to create a new texture for the displacement to work. So click on new. Another thing that we need to do is apply the scale. If we press N and go underneath the item tab, you will see the scale is 5.358. Now this is not really good. This basically means that it's going to scale up the texture five times. And we don't want this, we want it to be even at throughout the entire mesh. So in order to fix this, we need to apply the scale so it goes back to one. You can press control a with the plane selected and click on scale. Once we do that, the plane will snap back to the center and you will see the scale values are now set to one. And that is what we want. From there. We can go ahead and go over to the texture panel, which is this panel right here. It's a checkered pattern. And then for the type, we're going to switch over to clouds. Once we do this, we can see our texture is working correctly and it is looking pretty good. The size of the texture is controlled with this value right here. If we turn this up, the bumps will be a lot bigger. If we turn it down, the bumps will be a lot smaller. Let's go up to 0.5. From there we can go back over to the modifier. And this strength value controls how big the bumps are. If you want it more, you can turn it up if you want it less, Turn it down. Let's turn it down. So it's a little bit more subtle, probably around 0.3. Another thing that we can add is a subdivision surface. To smooth out the bumps. We can click add modifier and a subdivision surface and set both the view and the render to two. Now we can see we have some bumps and it looks much better. We can also right-click and select shade smooth to smooth out of the plane. All right, there we go. I'm pretty happy with that. Now let's work on the particle system. Lets jump over to the particle system Tab and create a new one. We'll call this particle system grass. From here we need to click on hair and there we can see it in our scene. Now currently the length is way too tall. This is not realistic. So we need to bring the link down quite a bit. Let's bring it down until we're happy with the result. Probably a little bit higher than that. Let's go with 0.1. And I think that will be pretty good. Now you also want to take into account what you're seeing is about if you're having like a mowed grass lawn or something, you would probably want the hair length pretty small. But if this is out in the forest or something like that, it'll be a little bit more random and chaotic. So the hair length would be a lot taller. Let's try 0.15 and I think that will look pretty good. I'm happy with that. And now let's turn on advanced. This will give us a lot more options to work with. If we open up the physics tab, we can see there's a Brownian option. What this allows you to do is actually get some randomness to the particles. So if we turn up the Brownian effect just by one, you will see it gives it some randomness like that. And the more we do it, the more chaotic the particles will look. That's a little bit too strong though, so we're going to bring that back down. I think a value of 0.3 to 0.4 is probably good. Let's go with 0.3. And now it's opened up the children's section. This allows us to add in multiple particles for each single particle in our scene. If we turn on a simple there, we can see a lot more particles and it's starting to look more like grass. If we scroll down to the children's section, there is a lot of options to change how our particles look, the display amount and render amount. What these two values do, the display amount is in the viewport. So for each particle it's actually sowing ten particles. So technically there is 10 thousand particles instead of just 100000, since the number is right here. Once we do the final render, it'll be actually 100 thousand. This is a little bit too much. I'm going to bring this back down to 20. So for each one particle, there'll be 20 particles in the Render. This length value controls the length of the children. So if I drag this down, you will see the Hare gets a lot shorter. If I drag it up, it gets taller. Let's drag it down to slightly to about 0.7, I think is good. That threshold, what this value does is it will give some randomness for each particle. If this is all the way up to one, it'll be completely random. If it's all the way down, it'll be all the same size. So with the length of 0.7 and a threshold of one, some particles will be taller and some will be shorter. I like to keep this about halfway so it's a little bit random. And then for the seed value, it's very similar to the seed value up here. It just changes where the particles are positioned and give it, and gives it some randomness. So if you don't like the position of the particles, just turn up the seed. We don't need to worry about the size or the random side because this actually deals with a mesh and not hair. So if we were using like cubes or cylinders or something like that, this size would actually control the size of the cylinders. But since we're using hair, This does not do anything. The radius controls how close the particles are to each other. So if I go into wireframe, we might be able to see this a little bit better. So you can see if I drag up the radius, it, it expands the particles outwards. And if I drag it lower, it brings them in. The roundness just gives it a little bit of randomness as well. A kind of rounds out the clump of children. I'm going to actually drag this down a little bit. Let's go with 0.15. And then for the clumping, here is where we get to actually change the shape of the children. So if I zoom in here, let's take a look at what this does. If you were to look at reference images of grass, you will notice the grass is kind of clumped together at the bottom and then expands outwards. Currently though, they're all just expanding from the ground or not clumped together. So with this value, if we drag this in, you will notice the particles get clumped together at the bottom, and that is exactly what we want. So what we need to do is drag this down to right about there outside negative 0.7 or 0.6 is probably a good value. And there we go. Now it, now this is starting to look like grass and it's looking much better. This shape right here controls the roundness. So if I zoom in on this pair right here, if you take a look at this, if I drag this value up, you can see it's starting to round out the hair. I'm gonna drag this up just slightly. You don't wanna go too high with this because it will look a little bit weird. And another cool value here is the twist. If we drag this up, you will notice the particles are actually twisting around each other. And you can animate this value and create some really interesting results. Right now though, we're just going to leave it at 0 since we don't really need to twist our grass. If we opened up with the roughness panel, this option here gives us a lot of control over the length of the hair, the position of it. You can see if I turn up the uniform, it kind of expands it out that way, which we don't really want. We just want to keep it at the center. But you have these options here. If you want, the endpoint gives you a kind of interesting result that kinda pushes the particles towards each other and kinda crosses. And then the random value here will also give some random destroy particles, which I might actually drag up to. Let's try 0. Let's go with five. And there we go. So now that we have all of our particles, we now need to increase the number of particles for arsine. Now keep in mind number right here. This is actually going to be ten times the amount that you set for the number because we have children particles. So if you have a slower computer, make sure you actually set the display under viewport display, maybe set this down to 10% before you bring up the number right here. Since I have a pretty fast computer, I'm actually going to leave the amount at 100% and I'm going to set the number 250 thousand. And there we go. We now have a lot more particles to work with. Now this is starting to look like grass. 31. Creating Grass P2 Vertex Groups: The next step is to add an a vertex for this allows us to determine where on the plane we want the particles to be. And this is very useful for rendering and making your memory a lot better. So what we're gonna do is position the camera right about here at this angle. All hit Control Alt and 0 to snap the camera to place command option 0 on a Mac. Then you can select the camera G middle mouse button and drag it back to the position that you want. Probably around here is good. And then I'll double-tap are and drag it like that. So now we have a pretty full view of the plane. And I think this is what we're going to use for our final render. Now for this scene, this next step actually isn't really necessary because there's not that many particles outside the camera. But if you have a full architecture scene with a ton of different assets and models and materials and all that. This will actually save a lot of time. So what we're gonna do is select the plane and go over to the object data panel, which is this triangle shape. This is our vertex groups. Currently we have 0. We need to create a new group. And you can name it by double-clicking on it. But we don't really need to since there's only one group. And then to actually change this vertex group, we need to go over to object down to weight paint. Once we do this, we can't really see anything at the moment. So let's press Z and go into wireframe. We still can't see it. So let's go ahead and hide the particles so we can actually work without them and it will smooth out the report as well. So let's go over to the Modifier tab and turn off the viewport of the particles. Currently Everything is blue. This means that there'll be no particles. Once we set this for the density, we want some of the plane to be read and some of the parts to be blue. So where there is red, there will be particles where there is blue, there'll be no particles. If we go into camera view, what we're gonna do is actually create a gradient because in the background we don't need as many particles in the foreground. We can actually do this very easily with this tool right here, which is the gradient tool. Let's go into top view but pressing seven. And then we'll select the gradient tool, make sure the weight is set to one. And then click and drag from where the camera is to the end, right about there. So now we have a gradient. What we can do next is go back into camera view and switch it back over to the brush tool, which is here, the Draw tool. Now with a weight of one, it's going to be painting Read, we don't want this, we want it to be painting blue so we can mask out the areas. So we're going to set the weight all the way down to 0 and then paint the edges of the plane. So right here I'm just going to click and drag and paint out the parts outside the camera. Now if you're creating an animation, you want to be careful about this because you don't want to pan the camera to where there is no particles. So make sure you know your animation before you start painting out where the particles are going to beat. All right, so there we go. So now we've painted out all of the spots for the particles. We can go ahead and go back into object mode. We can go ahead and bring back the particles by clicking on this button here. Now if we go into solid view, we can go over to the particle system tab and scroll down to the vertex groups. If we open up this panel, there is a lot of options for us to choose from. For the density, we're going to select the group that we just create it. Once we do this, you will notice the particles are actually gone on the edges and on the bottom. Now once again, this scene doesn't really need this step, but it is good to know for future scenes when there is a lot of stuff going on. So there you go. We've now created the particle system, and in the next video we'll work on the material. 32. Creating Grass P3 Hair Shape: Before we move on to the material, let's make sure the shape of the grass and the hair is actually correct. The hair shape is located in the particle system right underneath children. So if I close that panel and open up the hair shape, here is where we can change the thickness of the hair, how tall it is and all of that. So if we were surprised at z and go into rendered view right now, we're in E V by the way, and zoom in on a part of the hair, you would notice that they're all very uniform and very skinny. So what we need to do is actually go over to the Render Settings in EV. If we switch over to cycles, it will actually display the particles correctly as you can see there. If we switch over to EV though, those, those details of thick at the bottom and then skinny at the top is gone. How do we bring it back? Well, what we need to do is open up the hair settings and change it from strand over to strip. So now it's sharing the particle system settings for the thickness of the hair. This value here, the additional sub-divide, is basically exactly how it sounds. It'll just add in a layer of subdivision to smooth it out. So if I zoom in here, you will notice this goes up and then it cuts across. But if I bring it up to two, it will try to smooth out that curve. Let's go with a value of three to smooth it out. Now let's jump over to the particle system. And it changed some of the settings. First off though, to make this run a little bit faster, let's open up the viewport display and set the amount down to 1%. There we go. We got rid of all of them except for some over here. So let's zoom in on the spot and change the shape of the hair. The strand shape controls the height. If I drag this lower, you can see it becomes pretty thick all throughout. If I drag it all the way up to one, it's completely gone. You can see is becoming very skinny and very short. So we're just gonna leave it at 0 because I think that's probably fine. The diameter root, this value controls the thickness at the bottom of the particle. So if I drag this up, you can see it becomes pretty thick. If I drag it lower, you can see it becomes even skinnier. The tip value controls the thickness at the top. So if I bring this up, let's just go with one meter. You will see it becomes pretty thick right here, but it leaves the bottom at, around the same width. We're going to try a value of 0.2. I think that's perfectly fine. And the diameter scale controls the diameter of the entire thing. If I drag this up, it becomes very thick. If I drag it lower, it becomes pretty skinny. So what we're gonna do is set this to 0-zero. Let's try seven. Just so we can make it a little bit more skinny. So now if we zoom out, we can take a look at it. If it looks a little bit off, you can zoom back in and try it again. I think it still might be slightly too thick. So let's go with five. And I think that looks pretty good to me. I'm pretty happy with that thickness of the hair. And now we can bring the, the amount of the viewport, display it back up to 100%. And there we go. We've now created the thickness of the hair and now we can move on to the material. 33. Creating Grass P4 Grass Material: For this material, we're gonna go ahead and split this view to bring up the note editor. We're gonna click on this menu here and click on shader editor right there. I'm going to press end goes off that panel. Make sure you have your playing selected and give it a new material. For this material, we're gonna be using the principle shader. And for the base color, this is going to be the color of the plane itself. We're going to be creating a new material for the grass. So for the base color, since this is probably growing on a dearth, we're going to give it a nice dark color, something like this. And you will also see the particles are sharing that material, but don't worry, we'll fix that in just a second, probably around there and drive a slower. And we also need to bring the roughness up because a dirt is pretty rough, so probably around 0.9 is good. Now that we've created the material for the ground, let's go ahead and work on the grass material. To do this, we need to add in a new one. So come over here and click on that plus sign and create a new material. For this material, we're just gonna call it hair. Now with this material, it's going to get slightly complicated, but don't worry, we're going to walk through it step by step. The first node that we need to add as a hair info note, this allows us to change the hair from the bottom end to the top. If we press shift a, we can go over to input and then hair info note right here. This node is pretty cool and it allows you to do some pretty interesting things. This intercept value is what we want. Basically how this works is it will have two different values, 0 to one. The bottom of the hair will be 0 and the top of the hair will be one. From there, we can import those values into a colorRamp and determined the color as the Hare gets taller. So what we need to do is press shift a at an a converter and a colorRamp and we'll place it here. From there, we can take the intercept value, plug that into the factor, and then the color, plugging that into the base color of the principal shader. If we open up the preview, we can switch it over to this strand right here. And we can see this is working. It's dark at the bottom and becomes white at the top. What we need to do now is change the color. Now if we were to look closely at grass, you would notice that it's pretty dark at the bottom. It gets green in the middle. Then at the very top there's a slight white color. So what we're gonna do is actually leave this white handle. We're gonna hit the plus sign and drag this over to the right. And this color is going to be a nice green color. So I'm going to drag it over here, make it a little bit darker or something like that. Then we'll hit the plus sign, drag it over to the left. And for this one, it's going to be a little less saturated and a little bit darker. Something like this. Now currently we can't see anything in our viewport. And that is because we need to actually select that material in the particle system. So we'll jump over to the particle system. And then for the material selected, the hair material right there. Once we do this, we can see the grass is now using that material. And if we zoom in, you can see right at the top it's a white color and then at the bottom is a black color. The white might be a little bit too big, so I might drag the green over a little bit more. And there we go, look at that. So we've now created and grass. Another thing that we're gonna do with this material is adding a little bit of translucent. If we look closely at grass once again, you will notice that light actually passes through the grass. So in order to do that in blender, We need to press Shift a, add an add shader right here. And then I'll press shift a and add an, a translucent shader right here. If we then take the BSD f, plug that into the ad shader, you'll noticed everything turns white. So what we need to do now is take the color, plug that into the color of the translucent. And if we zoom in, you might notice a very slight difference, but light is actually passing through our grass now and it's looking a lot more realistic. Another thing that we'll do is bring the roughness down 2.3. This will just add a little bit of glossiness to the grass and I think it will look a little bit better. And that's basically the material for our grass. Now, if we zoom out, you'll notice there is a little bit of patchiness over there at the back of our back of our grass. So in order to fix that, let's just go ahead and fix the colorRamp. So I'm gonna go into top. You switch this over to weight page right here. And then what we're gonna do is just bring up the weight up slightly about 2.6. I'll press F2, increase the size of our brush, and then I'll just paint over top just like that. Right there. Now if we go back into camera view, maybe we'll paint it right there as well. There we go. We now don't have that patchiness and I think that looks slightly better. Then we'll go back into object mode. 34. Creating Grass P5 Lighting & Rendering: Now that the material is done, I think we are ready to do a render. I'm gonna go ahead and come up to this corner, click and drag to close that window. So we now have the full view for the lighting, for the surrender. I'm gonna go over to the world settings, dragging the color up to a little bit of a white color, maybe a little bit less than that. And for the lighting itself, I'm going to select the lamp, go over to the lamp settings and switch it over to a sun lamp. Now currently it's a strength of 1000 and we're going to bring this down to two. If we open up the shadow, we can turn on contact shadows. Then if we go over to the EV settings, we can turn on ambient occlusion and this will give us some shadows in the grass and I think that will look much better. Then underneath the color management, I'm going to set the look to medium contrast, actually medium high contrast. Turn on screen at space reflections. And this will give us actually reflections from the grass itself. And I think we are good to go. So from there, all we have to do is press F2 to render out an image. And since we are using EV, it should render pretty quickly. There you go, you can see it's done and there is our grass. Not too bad. I think it looks pretty good. Now just for the sake of testing, I'm going to switch over to slot t2 by hitting too. And you can see the slot number is set to two. I'm going to exit out of this window and switch the render engine over two cycles. For the render sampling, I'm going to set this down to 20 and then I'll press F2 to render out an image. All right, so there is our render. So let's go ahead and switch between EV and cycles. I'll hit one, this is our EV scene, and two, here is our cycles. Now, as you can see, cycles does have a little bit more realistic shadows, but overall, I think they both look pretty cool. So there you go. That is how you create graphs using the particle system. Now, if we look at this, this is a little bit chaotic. This probably would not work for a front lawn. You would have to trim it up a little bit, make it a little bit less long right here you can see there's a lot of grass. But overall, if this was like a field or something that's not really to regularly, this will look pretty good. So thank you for watching this section. Make sure you post your image that you created yourself in the assignment after this video. And I will see you in the next section. 35. Fluid Particle Overview: Hello everyone. And in this video I wanted to do a quick overview of the fluid particles and how they work in blender. To get over to the fluid particles, do you need to go over to the particle system and create a new one? Make sure that the type is set over two emitter. And then underneath the physics tab, we can set the physics type from this one over to the fluid type. Once we have selected the fluid type, there is a lot of options here. There are five different panels underneath here that also do a lot of options. If you watch my physics video on the Newtonian physics right here, most of these settings should look pretty familiar. Of course, we have the mass and then the multiply mass with size. If you have different sizes of particles getting emitted, You want to make sure that's turned on underneath that we have some new options for the fluid, this solver right here, there are two different options, double density and classical. They are just ways of solving the fluid and they're very similar and there's not much of a difference. These stiffness is what you're probably going to want to change. Basically, the stiffness makes your fluid very stiff and rigid and you can see the differences on screen. The viscosity is the thickness of the fluid. This basically changes how thick the fluid will spread out. You can see here, even though it's set to a higher value, since it weighs more and it's more thick, it's shooting down the plane. The buoyancy is an interesting one. If I play my simulation and I turn up the buoyancy, it basically inverts the gravity so the particles now rise upwards. The Brownian or here does something very similar to the Brownian in than regular physics. It basically just add some variation to the fluid. The drag also does the same thing, except in order to see this, we also need to bring the mass down to. So let's go with 0.01 for the mass. Now if we play our simulation and bring up the air drag, you can see they slow down a little bit. The dampening and it will slow down into the hole simulation. So if I play this and I bring up the dampening, it'll slow it down. I'm going to set the mass back up to one so it stops glitching. And we can see the effect that the dampening is doing. I'm going to close off the forces and open up the deflection. And here we have the same options, size d flight, but this will help on collisions and then Diane hit. So if you want your particle to die once it hits a collision object, you can turn that on. And then of course we have the collision collection. So you can limit the amount of collisions for the fluid simulation. Underneath the integration, there are a couple of different things here. We have the time step and this controls the speed of the simulation. So if I was to bring this down and play this, we can see it's falling very slowly. I'm gonna Control Z that. And then of course we also have the sub-frames and the adaptive, which we've already talked about, and the integration types right here. The next thing that we can talk about is the forces. This force value controls if there is any springiness and the particles. Now there is very subtle differences in the forces if you enable this. But you also want to be careful with the elastic springs because every time I've tried to use this blender has crashed on me right when I play the simulation. So we're not going to turn that on in the Advanced tab. There's also a rest length and this also has to do with the forces. It basically expands the fluid outwards as its resting. I'm gonna go ahead and close off the springs and open up the Advanced tab. There are four different options here. The repulsion of factor will actually spread the particles outwards. The stiffest rugosity is another way of doing the thickness of the fluid. And this is for expanding fluid as you can see in the description. So as the fluid expands, it becomes thicker. The interaction radius is the interaction radius of each of the particles. You turn this up, they are going to spread out further from each other. You turn it down. They're not going to spread out as much. The rest density is another way of doing the interaction radius, except it's for the resting particles. Turn it up, they are spreading out and turn them down. They are close together. So they go, that is the basics for the fluid type. In the next couple of videos, we will be actually creating this animation on screen. 36. Fluid Particle Tutorial P1 Particle System: Now that you have a basic understanding of fluid particles, let's go ahead and create an animation using them. To get started, we're going to use this default cube as a collision for the particles. Basically, what is going to happen is there's going to be a plane on this side. Let's go ahead and add that end by hitting Shift a, go to mesh. And then plane will rotate this plane at 90 degrees along the y-axis. So I'm going to hit our Then why? And if you hold control and look in the top left, you can snap it to 90 degrees, just like that. And then we'll press at G and X and move it over to the left. So basically what's going to happen is this plane is going to emit a lot of particles inside this cube. And it's going to create a fluid simulation using particles. Let's go ahead and select our default cube and scale it up a little bit so it's bigger than the plane. And then I'll hit S, then x and skill at along the x till it's completely inside to see what we're doing. And let's press Z and go into wireframe. There we go. That looks pretty good. I'm gonna go into front view by pressing one. And I think the scale is a little bit too big, so I'm going to press S and X and scale it down just slightly. Now that we've set up our scene, let's go ahead and work on other particle system. Select your plane and then go over to the particle system Tab and create a new one. We're going to leave the type at emitter. And for the start and the end frame, I'm going to set the end frame to 100. So whatever number that we put here, there'll be that many particles emitted before a 100 frames. The lifetime of the particles we're going to set up to 300. This animation is going to be 300 frames long and I don't want any of the particles do disappear. So make sure that said 2-300. Next up under velocity, we're going to set the x-direction right here up to a value of two. So the particles will actually shoot out in this direction. Let's go ahead and restart the animation and play it. And we can see they're falling straight through the ground. To fix that, select your collision. In this case, it's the default cube and go over to the Physics tab and enable collision. The dampening controls the bounciness of the particles. We're going to drive this up to 0.8. And then we'll give it a little bit of randomness. Let's go with 0.2. Now let's go ahead and restart and play it one more time. And there you can see the particles are actually colliding. Perfect. Let's select our particle system one more time. Go back over to the particle system tab and then open up the physics panel. Right now we're using this physics time. We don't want this, we want the fluid. So select it and click on fluid particles. We restart and play it. We can see there's not much of a difference, but now they're acting like fluid as you can see like that. That is looking pretty good so far, but we need to mess with some of these settings to get exactly how we want. So first off, the viscosity, which is the thickness of the fluid, and we're going to bring down to 0.5. This value is actually backwards. So if you can remember it, the lower values will make your fluid a lot more thick, and higher values will make it really thin. We're gonna set it to a value of 0.5, so we get a little bit of thick fluid. The Brownian effect, which controls the randomness of the fluid. And we're going to set this to 0.12. Just like that. And there we go. I think we're happy with those results. Let's go ahead and open up the integration. The sub-frames controls how many steps it will take per frame. Since the particles aren't moving too fast, we don't really need to set this to high, but just in case I'm gonna bring it up to four. And then for the timestep, I wanted to slow down a little bit because the particles are moving pretty fast. So let's try a value of 0.02, just so it slows down the simulation. Now if we restart and play it, we can see the particles are moving a little bit slower. And I think that looks pretty good. Underneath the deflection, we're gonna check on a size d flights because I've noticed sometimes at the particles will actually clip through the cube and at turning this on will help prevent that. Finally, underneath the Advanced tab, we're gonna mess with a couple of settings here. First off, the interaction radius, we are going to bring up to two. So the particles will have a much bigger radius when interacting with each other. And that's basically all we need to do for the fluid. If we open up the render tab, we can select Render eyes halo to render as object. And now for our instant object, I'm going to be using an ecosphere. So I'm going to press shift a and underneath mesh, I'm going to select ecosphere. Now before you do anything else, make sure you open up this panel and set the subdivisions down to a value of one. So now we have a lot less geometry to work with. For our final bake, we're going to actually use 50 thousand particles. If your subdivision is up to two, it's going to lag and lot more and there's going to be a lot more geometry to work with. So bring this down to one to save on memory, will drive this orbit to the left. And then we'll select our plane once again. And then scroll down to the render tab, and then select the ecosphere for the instance object. Now if we play it, we can see how big the ICA sphere is r. And currently there are a little bit too big. So let's bring the size of them down to, let's try 0.3 or so. I'll restart and play it. And I still think they're a little bit big. So maybe 0.2, I think will be good. And, and now that we've done that, we can scroll up to the number of particles and set this to 50 thousand. Now if we restart and then play it, we can see there is a lot more particles to work with. And also since we rotated this plane, let's go ahead and apply the rotation. So the physics over here in the velocity actually take into account. So I'm gonna hit control a and click on rotation, will restart and play it. And there you can see the particles are actually shooting out in this direction a lot more. That looks much better if you want them to go further out. Just said The object of velocity along the x May 2 be three. Now if we restart and play it, you can see they're shooting out even further. I think that looks pretty good. And now is go ahead and bake this in. So I'm going to open up the cache settings and set the end frame over here to 300. For the bake, let's actually go with 80 thousand particles instead of 50 thousand. I think it will look a little bit better with more particles. So let's go up to 80 thousand. Save your project and then go over to the bake button right here underneath the cash and then click on bake. Once this has finished, we'll work on the material. 37. Fluid Particle Tutorial P2 Material: The bank has finished and here is our result. If we restart the animation and hit the spacebar to play it, we can see exactly what it looks like. Not to band. You can see there is a lot of particles that get emitted and they splash up on the side. Now let's work on the material. First off though, make sure you have your plane selected and then go over to the render tab in the particle system. Down here at the bottom, we're going to turn off Show emitter so the plane does not show up in the render. We're also going to come up to the top click on this menu and turn on the camera icon and then turn it off for the queue because we don't want this one to show up either. So underneath the Cube, turn it off in the camera and in the viewport. So if we go back into solid view, you will see it's now gone. For the material, we're going to select the ecosphere, go over to the material tab and give it a new one. We can call this material particle. From there, we can go ahead and split this view and open up the shader editor by clicking on the drop down menu shader editor right there. This material, what I want is for the bottom of the particles do have a dark blue color and as the particle rises it becomes a lighter blue. We can do this very easily with an object info and a gradient texture. So what I'm gonna do is press shift a and go underneath input and then object info right here. If we then press shift a and add in a vector and a mapping node, we can control where the gradient is located on the particles. Take the location and plug it into the vector. Then we'll press shift a and add in a texture and then a gradient texture. Take the vector, plug it into the gradient right here. And then finally, we'll add an a Color Ramp to determined what the color is going to be. So underneath converter ad in a color ramp, take the color and then plug it into the factor and then the color into the base color of the principal shader. If we go over to our viewport now and press Z and go into rendered view, we should be able to see what the gradient looks like. If for some reason your particles are all wired to make sure you've selected the ecosphere and it will update itself. So there we go. We can see the gradient is working just fine, but it's going left to right. We want it to go up and down. So what we need to do is change the mapping location underneath the rotation. We're going to set the Y2 90 degrees. Once we do this, you will notice it's going up and down. If you want to change the location of the gradient, change it with this x value. If we drag this up a little bit, it'll drag the black value down. And so more white comes in, something like that will probably look good. Now for the color. Over in the colorRamp, we're going to select the black handle, and I'm going to switch it over to a dark blue color. Use whatever color that you want. For this tutorial though, I'll be using like a dark blue, something like this. Then will hit the plus sign to add an a new handle. And for this one it's going to be a slightly lighter blue something around here. And then finally, the last handle, this is going to be an even lighter blue right about there is probably good. Now to see what this looks like, I'm going to restart and hit the spacebar. And you'll notice it's a very light at the top, a little bit dark in the middle and then really dark on the bottom. And I think that looks pretty cool. You can add as many colors as you want. So for example, if you wanted the very top of the particles do have a white. You can hit the plus sign, drag it over to the right and switch this to a white color. You can do something like that. I think it looks a little bit weird though, so I'm gonna get rid of it and just leave it like that. Not too bad for the roughness in the principled shader. We're going to drag this down to 0.2 or so. I think that will look pretty good. It'll give us a nice and glossy look. And that's basically all we really need to do for the particles. In the next video, we will set up the lighting and render this out into an animation. 38. Fluid Particle Tutorial P3 Rendering the Animation: Now that our material is set up, let's go ahead and work on the lighting and the rest of the scene. First off, I'm going to click in the top corner and drive this oversaw. It gets rid of that window. And now we have the full view. I'm going to press shift a and add in a plane, and this is going to be the ground plane. I'll go into front view. Then I'll press g and Z0 and drying this lower until it's underneath the particles, right about, there is good. And then I'll press S2 scale and scale it out pretty big. For this material, we're going to click New and all we have to do is turn down the roughness to a value of 0.1. That will be pretty good and we'll leave the base color as white. Over in the EV settings. We're going to turn on ambient inclusion and a screen space reflections. If we then look up top, you'll notice there's some reflection in the plane and in the particles. We can also open up the color management and set the low to medium, high contrast. And you can see the colors now pop a little bit more. And as further world settings, I'm going to go over to the world and set the color up a little bit so it's brighter, something like this. We don't need a, this a lamp anymore, so I'm going to select it, press X and get rid of it. I'm really liking how this looks. So now for the camera, I'm going to position my viewport right about here. And I'll hit Control Alt n at NUM pad at 0 to snap the cameras a place or command option 0 on a Mac, you can then select your camera by coming up to the top here and selecting a camera G, middle mouse button and drag backwards. You can also press G and move it around if you want to. I think this location is pretty good. I'm happy with this. So now finally, let's go over to the output section, which is this panel right here in seven output of where we want our animation to go to. Once you have found the folder, you can go ahead and click Accept. And since we're rendering in EV, this is gonna go pretty fast. So we're not going to render this as an image sequence. Normally if you render in cycles or if you know your animations gonna take a long time, I would render it in an image sequence and then sequence it out later. But since this is going to be pretty fast, I don't see the need for it. So underneath the file format, we're going to switch it over to mpeg. Then underneath the encoding, We're going to set the container to mp4. Finally, the output quality, this is how good your animation we'll look in the final render. We're gonna go with high-quality. Once you have done all of those, we can go ahead and render this out. I'm going to save my project one more time just in case it crashes. And then go over to render and click on Render Animation. This'll bring up a new window and you can see it's starting to render right here. And as you can see, every 2.5th, there is a frame that's being added, so it is going pretty fast. I'm going to pause the video until it's done. Render has finished. And now to view your result, you can exit out of this window, go over to render, and then click on the view animation. This will bring up a new window where you can view your animation in real time. And as you can see, it does look pretty good. There is a lot of particles and they're acting just like fluid. So there you go. That is how you use fluid particles in blender to 0.9. Thank you for watching this section. If you created your own animation, make sure to post it in the assignment after this video. That's going to be it. And I'll see you in the next section. 39. Low Poly Fire P1 Particle System: Hello everyone. And in this section we will learn how to create this animation. I'll go from start to finish on how to create the particle system. Create that transition between the sizes and the cool material. So let's go ahead and get into it. The first thing that we need to add is the particle system. We're gonna be using a circle to emit the particles. So let's go ahead and delete the default cube, and then I'll press shift a, and then I will add in a circle with this circle selected. Let's go into edit mode and fill in a face by pressing the F key on your keyboard. And there we go. We now have a face. Now we can emit particles from this circle. Here is where you decide which particle you want to emit. You can use a UV sphere and ecosphere. You can even use a cube if you want to. I'm going to be sticking with an ecosphere right here. So I'll press today at this end and I'll drag it over to the left and press S2 scale. All the bit right about there. It's about half the size and that'll press control a. And then I will apply the scale just so we have the right skill for the particles. Next up, let's go ahead and select the circle and create the new particle system. We'll jump over to the particle system tab and hit that plus sign to create a new one. We'll call this low poly fire will leave the type on emitter. The number of particles is determined right here. And for this animation, I think around 200 particles will be pretty good. So I'm gonna type in 200. The frame.start and the frame end, we will leave at 200. So for every frame there'll be one particle that is added and the lifetime, which is the duration of how long the particles will live, will leave at 50. We're going to open up the velocity tab and set the normal to a value of three. So they just move a little bit faster. Right now though, if we play this, you will see they move up and then they just fall straight down. So we need to turn off gravity so they actually rise up. Let's go over to the settings over here underneath field weights and turn off gravity. Now once we restart and play this, now they are rising. That is looking pretty good. So now let's select the ecosphere for the instance object. Let's open up the render panel and set this from render as halo to render as object. And then of course for the instant object, let's select the ecosphere. Now currently the size is way too small, so we need to drag this up in the render tab will set the size to 1.2. And I think that will be pretty good. That looks not bad. And then defer the scale randomness. Let's drag that up to 0.7. So we have this sort of look. Now this is looking pretty good. I might want to set this a little bit higher. Let's try 1.3. Not too bad. Now let's work on the animation of where it moves up and then shrinks as it gets higher. We could do this really easily with a texture. First-off though, in the particle system, we need to scroll down all the way to the texture panel, open this up and create a new texture. From here we can jump over to the texture panel from the type, we're going to select a blend option here. And this will give us a gradient. You can see the preview right here. It starts out black and then it becomes white as it gets closer over here. If we open up the influence tab, we can decide what we want this texture to influence. There are a lot of different options here, general time lifetime density, and then size. This is the one that we want. If we uncheck general time and check on size, you can see it already working, but it's going the wrong way. You will see as going from left to right, we want it to go up and down. How do we do this? Well, if we scroll down to the mapping, we can select any coordinates and switch this over to strand particle. Now you will notice it's going up and down, but actually needs to be inverted. So let's go ahead and open up the colors and then click on Color Ramp. And here is where we can change and customize the size and all that with these with this color ramp. So first off, let's go ahead and flip this. I'm going to click on this button here and select flip colorRamp right here. And as you can see, it's now smaller at the top. Let's go ahead and play this to see what it looks like right now. And that is looking pretty good so far. But there is a little bit of tweaking that we need to do. First off, I'm going to drag this handle over to the left. And if we do this, you will notice the transition between the normal size and when it shrinks is very quick as you can see there. If you want a smoother transition, just drag this over to the left and it'll be a gradual transition between the size and then when it shrinks, I'm probably gonna go right about here. And then I'll hit the plus sign. And I'll select this color and drag this up just slightly so we have a little bit of a light gray color, something like that. And then over here on this left side, I want it to be a grey color. So I'm going to drag this over to the left and switch this over to a grey color. So it starts out small and then it gets big, and then it shrinks at the end. So let's see what this looks like. Now. If we play this, you can see it gets big and then it shrinks at the top. That's looking pretty cool and you can customize this however you want. If you want in the middle, I'll just do this for demonstration. I'll add an a handle. I'll switch this to black. So it does this sort of effect. And you can create some really interesting stuff here. You can have it shrink and then expand and shrink and expand and it looks, it looks pretty interesting. I'm gonna go ahead and delete that those since I don't want that. And there we go. We've now created our texture. One more thing that we'll do in this video is adding the wind force field. I'm going to press shift a and underneath force field, let's add in a wind force field that right here. If I go into front view by pressing one on my number pad, I can rotate this 90 degrees by hitting our and then I'll just place it over here. Let's see what happens if we play this. You'll notice the particles are really slowing down and they're going at a pretty tight angle. This is a little bit too strong. So let's go over to the Physics panel. And here is where we can change all of the settings in the force field, the flow amount. This will kind of slow down and create a flow for the particles. We're going to set that to 0. And the strength of this force field, I'm going to set 2.4. Now if we restart and then play this, you can see the particles are going up, but they have a slight movement over to the right. And I think that looks pretty cool. I think the size is still a little bit too small, so I'm going to select my particles, go over to the particle system tab and bring up the size just slightly, something like that. And maybe the random we'll drag that down. All right, there we go. I'm pretty happy with this result. And in the next video, we will create the material for the particle. 40. Low Poly Fire P2 Fire Material: In this video, we are going to learn about the material that I use to create the fire and smoke transition. This is pretty easy. All we have to do is select my particle right here and then open up the note editor. To do this, I'm gonna go over to the top right click and drag to split the window. So now we have two 3d view ports, but I want this one to be the note editor. We can switch this by selecting this menu and clicking on the shader editor right there. Or you can see the shortcut is shift F3. If you press and you can close off that panel to give yourself a little bit more room. I'm going to click on New for a new material and we'll call this fire and smoke. All right, here's our material. We have the base principled shader plugged into the material output. And for the base color, let's select a gray color that will represent the smoke. So we're going to switch this over to a nice gray color, something like this. And what we're going to be using is a particle info. Note this particle info anode is located in the inputs x. And so if we press shift a input particle info right here, we'll place that there. Now one thing to note about this particle infinite is that it doesn't work in EV unfortunately. So we will have to use cycles for this animation. So to switch over to cycles, go over to the Render Settings underneath the render engine, switch over two cycles. Now this a particle info node will actually work. Next up, let's add in the emission trader. So I'm going to press shift a Underneath shader. We're going to add in an emission shader and place that here for the color. Select a fiery looking orange, something like this. And then for the strength of that, I'm going to set it to three. To actually combine both of these, we can press shift a and add an a shader and then a mix shader right here and place it in between. Then take the emission and plug that into the bottom input of the mix shader. If we move over to the 3D view port and press Z and go into rendered view, we can see what our material looks like. This factor value controls if it's the principal shader or if it's the mission. If I drag it all the way to the left, it's the principal shader. If I drag it all the way to the right, it is the emission shader. So what we can actually do is with the particle info note, if we take the age value, we can actually control when this mix shader is actually working. So if we take the age and plug that into the factor, you won't really see anything right now. And that's because this is not going to work. We need to actually divide the age and the lifetime together. And this will give us an input where we can use into the mix shader. If that didn't make sense, don't worry, I'll explain it as we go. The first node that we need to add is a converter and math node, I'm going to press shift a converter math node and we'll place that there. If we then take the age value, plug that into the top input, and then the lifetime value, plug that into the bottom input and switch this over to divide. Now if we take the value, plug that into the factor. Now we can see this is actually working down here at the bottom it's using the principle shader than at the top. It's using the emission. We need to actually invert this. So all we have to do is add an a colorant. I'm going to press shift a go over two converter colorRamp, and we'll place that here. And this works exactly as the texture did in the last video. If we click on this button, we can flip the color ramp. Then all we have to do is drag the black value closer and we get this effect. So now if we press the spacebar to play it, this is what it looks like. Not too bad. You can see it starts out as the fiery color and then it transitions into the dark gray smoke. If you want more black, all you have to do is drag this black handled closer to the white and it goes like that. So probably around there is good for me, maybe a little bit closer. Not too bad. And then for the color, I might give it a little bit more of an orange color, something like this, I think will look pretty good. And there we go. I'm pretty happy with this result. 41. Low Poly Fire P3 Logs & Lighting: Now that we have our simulation set up with the particle system and material, now we can create the background. This is going to be pretty simple. Let's first go ahead and close off this window since we're not going to need it anymore. I'm going to come up to the top right click and drag and you will see the arrow and this will close off that window. So now we have the full view. First off, though, what I forgot to do in the particle system video was actually Heidi Dimitar. So with the particle system selected, go over to the this panel and scroll down underneath the render and turn off a show emitter will have to restart the animation and play it one more time. But once we do the final render, this circle will not show up in the view. The next thing will add is a couple of logs underneath the fire to actually make it look like something is on fire. And it's not just randomly appearing. I'm going to press shift and add in a cylinder and with this cylinder select it will open up this panel and currently it's using 32 vertices for the circle. This is a pretty smooth circle right now. We have these low poly smoke and low poly fire. And so 32 is a little bit too high. Let's try a value of let's go is 16 maybe. And I think that will look better. So now we have a low poly looking cylinder and this will be a good log. I'm going to press Z and go into a solid view and scale this down. Then I'll press S and Z and scale it up so it's a little bit longer and then I'll process and scale the entire thing up, something like that. From here, all we have to do is place in a couple logs. So pretty easy way to do this is to double tap R and you can rotate it like this and then I'll go into top you by pressing seven and just place it right about here. Then we're going to press alt d to duplicate it and then rotated around and then place it on top, something like this. And this is pretty simple and you can do it however you want. All you have to do is just rotate place, rotate and do something like this. So I'm going to go into front of you or rotate it. So it's actually on the ground, will place it right there, will go back into top you by pressing seven and I'll go like this and then I'll select this one alt d and then I'll rotate it over here. And for this one I might actually rotate it up a little bit longer. And there we go. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just place a couple of logs around just like a campfire and then we'll be good to go. Next up, the material for this. We're going to go over to the material tab and give it a new one. And for the base color, just select a nice dark brown looking color somewhere around here. So it looks like burnt logs or something like that. And I'm pretty happy with that color. Now, if we press Z and go into rendered view there, we can see it now since we pressed alt D instead of shifting, it actually linked all of these objects. This means if I go into edit mode and I select this face, it'll actually do the exact same thing for all the other objects because they are linked. If you press shifty, it's actually going to duplicate it and it won't be linked for the ground. We're going to press ship day and add in a plane and then go into front of you, drag this plane a little bit lower. So it's on the ground right next to the logs and I'll scale it up over in the back. We're going to go into edit mode and if we press it, too, this will go into edge. Select a mode. We can select that back edge press itoh extrude and drag it upwards. Let's give this corner some level, also like that edge press control B to Bevell, and we'll jack it up and then we'll use the scroll wheel to add in some more geometry to smooth it out. Something like that will look pretty good. Then we can. Right. Click and go sheild smooth. There he goes, and now we have a nice transition for the background, we'll go into front of you and let's place the camera. I'm going to zoom in and then I'll hit control alt zero to snap the camera to place command option zero on a Mac. Then we'll select the camera Preussag middle mouse button and drag it backwards and then place it where you want so you can press to move. You can press, are to rotate, are easy to rotate it like this. Move it around until you're happy with the position. I'm going to press the spacebar to see if our fire is actually in frame. And as you can see, it actually passes. It's all press g middle mouse button. Drag it back even further until we get the entire frame in view. To see what this looks like out Z and go into rendered view and this is looking pretty good, but we can also see the particle right here that's not good. So we'll select it and just move it all the way to the left. So it's out of the view. As for the lighting, we can select the default lamp in our scene and switch it over to the sun lamp. Currently, though, it's using the strength of 1000, which is way too strong. Let's try a value of three. And I think that looks pretty cool, as for the material for the plane, we can go ahead and select it, go over to the material tab if it's not already selected, and click on new the roughness value controls, how glossy the plane will look. If we drag this down, it'll give us a nice glossy look. And as you can see, there is a little bit of reflection on the floor. I'm pretty happy with this result. So let's go ahead and give it a test render. I'm going to go over to the render settings, set the render amount to let's say we'll go at 20 and then I'll press at 12 to render out an image. This should go pretty fast since we're only using it 20 frames. And you might notice something like this. What is happening or basically what's happening since we did it back in the particle system, it's kind of breaking it and it's not showing up correctly. So what we need to do to fix this is to select the particle system, go over to the particle system tab, open up the cache settings and click on a break. Now, you can see we've baked in the particle system. Now we can select any frame quickly and it will display what the particle system looks like. So we'll select from one hundred and forty four and press F twelve once we do this. Now you can see the particles are actually displaying correctly right now. There is a lot of noise in our scene and there is a very easy way to get rid of this in the compositor. We're going to go ahead and exit out of this window and go over to the compositing tab. If we press in and then we close off this window by dragging it down in the corner, now we have a lot more room click on use notes. This will bring in a render layer and a composite. Here is where we can change how the render looks to actually see what we're doing. We're going to add in a viewer node. If you hold control shift or command shift on a Mac and left click on this, it'll bring in a viewer node and now we can see what we're doing to zoom out. You can press TV and to zoom in. You can press all TV. I'm going to go somewhere around here and then we'll press shifty underneath filter, we're going to select noise and we'll place that here. Once we do this, you will notice the image looks much, much better. All of the noise is gone with just a single note. Make sure you plug this into the composite as well. And another thing that we're going to do is actually add in a little bit more detail to this de noise. You will notice there is three different values here, the image, the normal and the albedo. But there's nothing in the render layers. That is because we need to go over to the render layers right here and turn on a noisy data. Once we do this, you will see a lot more noise in options. From here. We can take the normal plug that into the normal and the albedo and plugging that into the albedo of the noise. You won't notice anything right away. And that is because we need to actually re render our image. But before we do that, let's shift away and add in a filter. And then a glaring note. I want to add a little bit of glare to the fire. So place that in there. And then for the threshold value, let's bring this a lot lower. Let's try point to once we do this, you will see a little bit of glare on the the fire, but it's actually a little bit too strong. So let's try a value of zero point for another thing I'll do is I'll switch it from streak's over to Foglio and I think this will look a little bit better. Not too bad. You can see there is a little bit of glare right there, and I'm pretty happy with that result. Make sure you plug the image into the composite. And I think we're ready to do a final render to render an animation in Blender. What we need to do is first go over to the output section here and set an output. Since we're using cycles, we're actually going to render this into frames and then sequence it out later. I'm going to click on this button here and navigate to a folder of where you want your frames to go to once you have found a folder, go ahead and click on Accept. And now every single frame will go into this folder. Now, if you're wondering why, we're wondering as a image sequence instead of like a movie file right here, the reason for that is because if it crashes, if blender crashes or there's a problem that we need to stop the render, if we stop it as a movie file, we'll have to redo the entire thing. As an image sequence, you can see this button here called overwrite, if this is unchecked, we can stop the render any time and resume. And at the point that we left off, if overwrite is checked, then that means that over all the images already in that file. So if you ever stop the render halfway through, make sure overwrite is unchecked. So it will actually resume at that point. From there, we can save our project by hitting control and I'll save it to this folder right here. Then from here, we'll go over to render and click on render animation. This will bring up a new window and it will start to render out our scene. 42. Low Poly Fire Image P4 Sequencing: The render has finished. If you want to see a result, you can go ahead and exit out of this window and go over to render and then click on view animation. Or you can see the shortcut is Control F 11. Once we click on this, there'll be a new window that appears and it will show you your render. So there you go, guys. That is how you create low poly fire using the particle system. Now if you're wondering how to sequence all of those images into a mood file where you can upload to YouTube or Facebook or anything like that or Twitter. It's pretty easy. All we have to do is come over to the top, click on this plus sign and go over to video editing and then video editing, editing right here. This will take us to this window. Now we have to import all of those images as an image sequence and then will render that out as a movie file. So make sure you're on frame one by hitting that Skip button and then go over to add down to him and sequence and then navigate to where your images are. Once you have found your folder, you can press a to select everything. Also makes sure that frame one is in the top left. It's the first frame that you see if for some reason two hundred and fifty two hundred and fiftieth frame is the first one you see. That means your animation will play backwards. So in order to fix that, click on this and make sure that the name is what you sort by, not the modified date. See if I click on modify date is the 250th. Make sure name is what it is. Now once you've done that, press a to select everything and go Add Image strip. And there we can see it in our timeline. So all we have to do next is come over to the file format and switch it over to a.mov file of your choice. I'm gonna go with mpeg. Then underneath the encoding, I'm gonna set the container to mp4. The output quality I'm gonna go with very high, so high quality. Then all you have to do is go over to render and then Render Animation. This will grab all of those images and sequence them out into a.mov file. As you can see, it's rendering very quickly. It's already at frame 50 and it'll be done in just a couple seconds. So there you go, guys. That is how you render low poly fire using blunder. If you created your own animation out of this, make sure to post it in the assignment after this video. Thanks again and I'll see you in the next one. 43. Particle Edit Overview: Hello everyone and welcome to a new section. This section is all about creating hair using the particle system. To get started with this section, we're gonna do a basic overview of the tools that you can use to comb, cut the hair, do all that sort of stuff. And it to get started, let's go ahead and delete the default cube and then we'll press shift a and add an a UV sphere. To give ourselves a little bit more geometry on this UV sphere, I'm going to hit Control to or command to on a keyboard. And this will add in a subdivision surface modifier. From there we can right-click and go shade smooth. Next up, if we go over to the particle system settings, we can create a new particle system and then switch the type over to hair. Now one thing to keep in mind is when we start combing and getting all of the hair in the right position, these settings on the right will disappear and he won't be able to change them. So make sure you get all of your settings correct before you go over to the particle edit mode. And I'll show you exactly how that works. For now. I'm going to set the number to 0. So we start out with 0 hair. And actually before we do that, let's bring the length that down a little bit, right about there. And then we'll set the number of particles to 0. Next up to actually go over to the particle edit where we can start adding in comin, we need to go over to the object mode button and you will see an option for particle edit. If we click on this, now we can start adding, combing and doing all that sort of stuff. And you'll notice on the right, all of these settings are now grayed out, so you can't change the length or the number anymore. Over on the left side, we have a couple of different tools that we can go through. This first one is comb and this allows you to move the hair round. And the first one that we'll talk about though, is the add option. If we click on this, we can start adding in our own hair. On the top we have a couple of different values that we can change. The radius controls the radius of your brush. And if I press the f key, I can also change the radius. So if I drag my mouse out, it'll bring it up. If I drag it closer, it'll bring it smaller. The count controls how many particles will be added every time you click. So if I click right here on the side, it will add in ten particles. If I bring the count down to one, and then I click, it will only add in one particle. Now that we've added in some particles, let's go over to the cone brush. If I click on the cone brush, we can actually start moving our hair around as you can see here, and start combing it into place. You might notice though that it looks at very jagged and that is because it's kind of low poly hair. To fix that we can add in some more geometry to this over on the top left. And there are three different modes to view the hair. This one will allow you to see every single vertex on your hair. This one will allow you to see the end vertex right there, as you can see right at the end and has a single vertex. I like using this one because I can see exactly what the hair looks like and where the, the vertexes and vertices are on the hair itself. Let's go back over to the ad brush and there are a couple of other settings here. We have the keys and this is the amount of vertices that will be added. So if I bring this up to a value of ten. And then I click right here, you'll see there's actually ten vertices now. From there, I can add in a little bit more. I can go back over to the brush and start painting this. And we have a lot more geometry to work with. In the ad brush. There's also an interpellate button. And if we turn this on, it will actually try to follow the position of the hair so we can see our hair looks like this. If I add a brush in, you can see the hair actually follows the curve of the other hair in its place. If this is turned off, it will just add in a straight hair just like this without following it. But if we turn it on and add it, it'll follow just like that. Going back over to the cone brush, we have a couple of different settings here. The strength, if we turn it all the way up to one, it has a very high strength just like this. If this is lower, it will have a hard time trying to brush the hair. You'll have to do it in many, many times. Deflect emitter. This will make sure the hair doesn't go through the mesh. If this is turned on and I select my cone brush and I bring the strength of so we can see it. I can't go inside the mess. You can see the hair is stuck on the outside. If this is turned off and I tried to brush it in, you can see the hair is actually going through the object. The distance option, you probably guessed it already. It controls the distance from the mesh. So if this is up higher and I start to paint, you can see they all just shoot outwards because distance is so high. Keeping this at a low value is probably good. 0.25 works for most scenes, the smooth Brush allows you to smooth out your particles. Right now you can see there is a very sharp edge. And so if I select the smooth brush, bring up my brush a little bit and start painting, it'll try to smooth it out. The length of the hair is also a cool and it allows you to shrink or grow your hair. There are two different modes, grow and shrink. And if I select the grow option and I click, it'll start to grow out the hair. If I hold the Shift key, it will actually do the opposite. So if I click right here, it will start to shrink. So whichever mode you're in, a shift will do the exact opposite. If I'm on shrink and I hold shift, it'll grow it. If I let go shift and I start to click, it'll drag it down. Another thing that you're going to want to keep in mind is if you just click and hold, it will only shrink it a little bit. You actually have to move your mouse around for it to grow. So if I hold Shift and then click, you can see it's not moving. I have to actually move my mouse for the hair to grow outwards. Underneath the length brush, we have the poof brush and this basically just puts out the hair. It's very similar to the smooth brush, except it's a little bit stronger. If I click and drag, you can see it really just smooth out the hair just like that. With the puff brush, we actually have two different options here at the top. One is add and subtract. Add will actually add it to your hair and poof it outwards and then subtract will actually shrink it int, as you can see here. The next tool that we have here is the Cut tool. This allows you to actually cut the hair. So if we select it and then all we have to do is click and drag, it will actually cut the hair. Another thing to keep in mind is whenever you cut the hair, the vertices or the amount of steps in your hair will remain the same. So if I zoom in on here, we have 12345 vertices on this. If I cut right there, it's still remains at 512345. It doesn't cut where the vertices are at. It actually brings the vertices down so that the steps remain the same. All you have to do is click and drag to cut the hair. If we bring the strength down and then we start to click and drag. Sometimes we will actually miss where the vertices are. As you can see there, there's a little spot that was left. And if I drag it even lower, you can see more of an effect. You can see some of the hair is getting cut, but some of them is remaining, is just basically a percentage of the amount that gets cut. The way gradient allows you to add an a vertex group to the hair. This can control the length of it, the density and all sorts of other stuff. So with the weight Tool selected, if I bring the strength all the way up to 100%, I can add in some red to the ends right here. This will also change the material if you add in a attribute node with the vertex group. And there is a lot of other cool things that you can do with this, with this tool right here. If you can remember in the vertex grew video, if the strength is set to 0, it will add in the blue. And if the strength is set to one, it will add in the red, which is 100%. Another cool thing that you can do with the particle edit mode is actually select individual hairs to comb out. So if I hold the L key, I can actually hover over where the hair is and it will automatically select those parts. From here with the selection, I can go over to the cone brush and just cone where that selection is a won't touch any of the other hair. It will only grab that selection. Another way to select your hair is if you press alt a that will deselect, you can press the C key on your keyboard, and this will bring up this circle select from here you can start to select the hair just like this. And then of course, if we go back out by right-clicking, we can start to come in at that spot. But then again, it will only move the particles that are attached to the selection or the selection itself. So you can see down here these particles, even though they aren't selected, they are connected to the hair so they are moving as well. Now let's talk about the Properties panel. If we open up the Properties panel by pressing T to open up the property panel, it is not t, It's actually n on your keyboard. So make sure to press that if you're trying to open up that panel, we have a couple options here. It's just the same thing, the radius, the strength, same thing up here, but we also have options. Over here. We have a couple of different things that we can change to help us come the hair. Right now the particle type, right now the editing type is set to particles. This means that it's going to edit the particles. We also have soft body in cloth, but since we're working with particles, we don't need to change this. The x mirror, this is for symmetry. If I turn this on and I start to comb, you won't see any difference. And that is because this only works for newly added hair. So if we go over to the ad brush and then we click right here, you can see the hair is actually being added to the other side. From there I can select the cone brush and start to comment. Let me actually de-select that income, this and you'll notice the hair is acting the exact same way. This is very useful if you're looking for a cemetery, but But if you're going for realism, I wouldn't stick around this too much. You can get the basic shape of the hair and then turn it off and add some subtle differences to each side. Underneath the x mirror, we have two different preserve options. The length controls the length. So you can see here if I start to comb, it's not going to add any linked to this. If I turn the preserve of a strand of links off, I can click and drag and you can see it's adding linked to the hair. You want to be careful with this because sometimes you can get really crazy results. I'm gonna go ahead and control Z that and turn it back on. The preserve at root option here allows you to make sure the hair is sticking to the emitter. So right now if I start to comment, you can see the hair is stuck right there. But if I turn it off and I click and drag the Hare actually detaches from the mesh and I can move it around. Underneath the preserve option, we have cut particles to shape and this allows you to actually cut the hair according to a mesh. To test this out, I'm going to add in some more hair. I'm going to click and drag and just add in a bunch of hair just like this. And then we'll add in our own shape. So I'm gonna go back over to particle at it and go to object mode. Then shift a, I will add in a cube. I'll place the cube right about here, r, So that looks pretty good. And then we'll select our hair again, go over to object particle edit. And then for the shape object selected cube. But for some reason this menu seems to be bugged. I can't select any of the cube, so click on the eyedropper tool and select the Cube manually just like that. Then if we click on it, cut, it will actually cut the length of the hair to the queue. Let's go ahead and delete the cube now to see what it looks like. And as you can see, we have this sort of effect. Finally, the last step here is the past steps and the children option. The past steps is basically the resolution. So we can see here, if I zoom in on this hair, We have a very sharp edge. If I bring the steps up a little bit, it'll start to smooth out the hair. This is very useful because it doesn't add any geometry, it just moves it out. Normally I like working with a keys of ten, which is ten vertices per hair, and then a step of about five or six. And this will help really smooth it out and make it look pretty good. The last check box we have here is children, and this will enable you to see the children or to not see it. The Trojan detection is over here in the particle system. If I open this up and send it over to simple, right now you can't see it. But if we turn on at children, now we can see this. So for every one strand of hair, there's going to be this amount that you can see. The display amount is currently set to ten and the render is currently set to 100. If I bring the display amount up to 20, for every one particle, there's going to be 20 displayed. This allows you to add an a lot more hair and it gives you a lot more realistic results, as you can see here, even though this looks pretty bad, it actually looks a lot more realistic. So if I uncheck this, the children will hide, and if I turn it on, the children will come back. So there you go. That is a basic overview of the particle edit mode. And in the next couple of videos, we will actually be stylizing the hair, adding a material and creating a cool image. 44. Creating Hair P1 Stylizing: Now that you have a basic understanding about how particle editing works, let's start working on actually stylizing the hair. To get started, I'm going to delete the default cube and then press shift a and we will add an AUB sphere. This UV sphere is going to represent a head and we're going to model the hair around it. We don't need the camera or the lamp, so I'm going to just going to get rid of them. And then we'll select the UV sphere and hit control to this will automatically add a subdivision surface modifier to this. We can also right-click and go shade smooth. From here we can add in the particle system, jumping over to the particle system tab, I'm going to click that plus sign to create a new one. And then we'll switch it over to hair. The length of the hair we're going to bring down all the way to one. And you'll see why I'm doing that in just a second. And the number of particles we're going to bring down to 0. Next up, we're going to start adding in the hair. So we're gonna go up to the object mode button and then click on particle edit. From here we're going to start adding the hair to the back of the head. So this side is the front and the back of the head is over here. So what we're gonna do is go into the back view by hitting control one. And now we're facing the back. We're gonna press N and then go over to the tool panel underneath the options, click on X mere, This will mirror the hair for us so we don't have to do everything twice. Next up, click on the Add button. We're going to start adding hair along the bottom right here. And then we'll do the middle, and then we'll do the top. We're gonna set the account to one. So we're going to have one hair per every time that we click. And the keys right here, the number of vertices we're going to bring up to ten. Now we can start adding it in. So what I'm gonna do is zoom in and probably start right about here. So I'm going to left click. Then I'll move a little bit to the right, left-click again, and just do this until we meet at the center. So probably around here is good. That many hair. And then we'll go into side view by pressing three on our number pad. And then we'll start combing these down. I'm also going to switch to the vertices mode right here, so we can actually see the vertices on our hair. I'm going to select the cone brush and just start comin it down so you can press F2, drag your brush outwards, and just start doing it like this. And when you start combing the hair, you wanna think about how it will look naturally. So maybe down here at the bottom, instead of having it just go straight down, I might kind of curve the bottom like this slightly, something like this. And this is the part where you can just play around with thin and get something that you like. Next I'll go into front view by pressing one. And what I'll do here is kind of style the hair going out like that. So we have sort of like an angle, something around there, go into side view by pressing three. And basically how this works, you just go back and forth between the different views, between the different tools and start adding in the hair. So now that we've added in some basic care, let's enable children so we can actually see what the hare will look like once it's fully rendered. To do this, we're going to open up the children section and then click on simple. To actually see this in real time, you can enable the children option right here. And also another thing that we're gonna do is set the path steps up to six. This will smooth out the hair, as you can see here. Over in the display amount. We're gonna set the display up to 100 and the render amount to 200. So for every one particle there's gonna be a 100 display. To refresh that, just double-click on the children again. And there you can see our hair going back into sideview. Another thing that we're going to want to change is the radius and roundness over here. The radius and roundness options here allow us to actually change how the hair is clumped together. Make sure your object modes, you can actually see it in real time. So for the radius, I'm going to bring it down 2. Let's go 125. So there are just a little bit closer together. And then for the roundness, if I drag this up, it'll kind of round out the hair. We're gonna go to about 0.4.3. Somewhere around. There will probably be good. Underneath the viewport display, if you bring up the strand steps, it will help smooth out the hair and make it look a little bit better than underneath the render tab. We can also turn on at B spline and set the steps up to four. And this will also help smooth it out. There we go, we are starting to get our hair looking pretty good. Now let's go back into particle edit and start messing around with the hair once again. So jumping back over to particle edit will go into psi bw by pressing three. And now this time we're actually going to add some hair going around this way. So we're gonna click on the Add brush right here. And then what I'll do is I'll just start clicking right about here is probably good. Click there. And I'll also uncheck children so we can see what we're doing. And then just start clicking around this way. So we'll go all the way around here. You can also change the view so you can see what you're doing a little bit better. I'll go right there. And this is the part where it gets a little bit tedious. But all you have to do is just start clicking around all controls do that one. Probably, you know, maybe right there, I think that one's better. And now a trick that we're going to use, because I don't want to change how this hair looks. I only want to affect this hair. So if you can remember, what we can do is go into top view and then holding the L key, I'm going to just click over here and select all of these. Then if we go into sideview again by pressing three, we can select the comb brush tool and start, and start combing the hair, and it won't affect the ones down here. So once we start this, you can see they're not they're not moving the hair, they're only moving the ones that we have selected. Now currently these are a little bit too short. We wanna make sure it's the same length. So we're going to click on the link tool, which is this one right here. And press Z and go into wireframes will select everything. I'll drag my brush up by pressing f, and then we'll just click and drag and add in a little bit more length. Going back over to the cone brush will come in place, add a little bit more length or so, something like, oh, I didn't select it. There we go. A little bit more length. There we go, something like this. And then at the end here I'll kind of curve these end slightly. Then going into a front view will press one. And then we'll position this in place as well. So we'll drag this down a little bit. Kinda do it like this or drag this line out. Kind of a curve, something like that's probably good. Then to actually see what this looks like. We can enable children. And there we go. We have a lot more hair to work with. Now. Next up we get into the fun part. We're gonna go into top view and actually add in some hair going across the top of the head. So what I'll do is I'll go into top view by pressing seven. And then we'll come over here and click on the Add brush tool. And then we'll start clicking right here. So I'm going to uncheck children just so we can see what we're doing. And I'll probably start around here are so, so all left-click on also, worried don't want cemetery. So I'm going to turn off the X on the mirror and then I'll click right about there and just drag this down. So we'll add in a bunch of hairs going across. Controls you that little place it there. All the way across the head until we get to the front. Probably around there is good. Let's go back into top view. Just double-check one more time. And I think that is looking pretty good. So from here, Let's de-select these hairs by hitting alt and a. And then we'll select the ones up top. So holding l, I'll just select all of these. Currently they are way too short because what we're gonna do is bring it all the way across and have them end up down here. So we need to add a lot of length. So it clicking on the length of brush tool. We're going to click and drag until they're very, very long. Probably around there is good. Then we'll select the comb brush and start combing it into place. So this part's pretty easy. Just go all the way across like this and drag it down. Now for this part, we can see if we go into sideview that some of the hair is shorter and some of the hair is longer. So what we can do now is actually add some length and then trim it up. We can see here there is a little weird issue here. So what I'll do is I'll go into back view by hitting control one on my number pad. And I'll just drag those down just slightly, something like that. And there you can see it's now fixed. We'll go back into front view and drag them down. So what I'll do is I'll add some more length. So I'll click on the length of brush tool and just click and drag. And sometimes if you click and the other ones don't move, well you can do is press Z and go into wireframe view. And then once you click, you can see the whole thing is now moving. So I'll add in a bunch of length. Then I'll select the cone brush and I'll comin back into place. And once I'm happy with how the length is, probably around there, go back into solid view by pressing the z. Take a look at it. I think that's pretty good. We'll go into sideview and now we get to trim it up. So to trim we can select the length, the brush one more time. And if I hold shift, it will actually shrink the length of the hair. So I'll click and drag until it's the, about the same length, just go back and forth holding shift right about there. So now if we enabled children once again, we can see we have a lot more hair and it's actually starting to look like an actual human head. Sometimes you might have a little bit of a gap between the different hairs and what you can do there is just adding a couple more hairs in place. So what I'll do is I'll click the Add. And if we enable interpellate by clicking on that button there, we can start placing the hair going down this way. So I'll click right about there. I'll add one. There may be another one right there because I think that's pretty thin and just add in a couple of hairs to the parts where there is a little bit less like you can see here, there's a gap. So I'll click right about there. So add in another one there. And there you go. Now we've fixed that issue. Another thing that we're gonna do is actually have the front part of the hair a little bit higher than the rest. So I'll press Alt, a 2D select, then all press L and select it that first hair right there. If we grab the cone brush tool and go into front view, we're actually going to drag it up a little bit, up like this and kinda out this way slightly. And just start dragging it up just a tiny bit, just to give it some variation. So you can see here the front is just slightly taller than the rest. And I think that looks kind of interesting. If you want to, you can select the one behind it. So looks like this one is the one behind it. Go into front view again and drag this one up as well. So it's a little bit less of a hard cutoff, something like that, maybe out this way. And there you go. As you can see, that looks a little bit better. It's not flat on the surface is actually just slightly. And now since we actually move the front one up, I think we need to add a little bit of link to it. So you can see over here, I'm going to press Alt a, then L, and we'll select this one. Yep, there we go. We can also turn off the children just as see what we're doing. Oh, I didn't mean deselect that one. I'll just select this front one. And if we start comin, you can see here it actually kind of moves them ones up top. All we want to do is add in a little bit of linked to this. So what we can do actually is with the cone brushes selected, we can turn off preserve strand. If we turn that off, click and drag and we can just drag that bottom bit down just a little bit. Then we can turn that back on. See what that does is it allows us to actually change the length of the hair. And now that that's back on, that length is now stuck and we can't change it. Our hair is coming along just fine. Everything is looking pretty good. The next step is to fix a small issue that we have in the children up here. If we zoom in here, you'll notice that some of the hair is actually sticking outside of the head. And the reason for that is because of the children there. The one strand is inside the head, but the children around it are sticking out. So an easy way to fix this is to go into front view by pressing one. I'm going to uncheck children so we can see what we're doing. And then Z and I'll go into wireframe. I'm going to press B for box delight and draw a box around all of these vertices. So we can see here I've selected all those ones. Hit, that looks good. And now next step is we're going to right-click and then subdivide it. So if we click on sub-divide, it will add in a another, another set of vertices in the middle. Then we'll go back into front view. And what we're gonna do next is actually de-select all of the vertices on the left. So what you can do is press C and if you click your middle mouse button, it will deselect. So make sure all of those are de-selected except for the end vertices right there. So make sure all of these ones are selected, which they are. That looks good. We'll go back into front view by pressing one. And what we're gonna do now is actually dragged them inside the head. Currently though, if the preserve at root option is checked, that means you can't move them. So we need to uncheck this. And then if I press it G, I can actually move them around. I'm going to drag them inside the head right about there are so and then we'll turn this back on. So now if we enabled the children, you can see all of the hair or actually inside the head now and nothing is sticking out. So that is that is a fixed for an issue that happens every once in a while. So all you have to do is just move the vertices inside the head and that should fix it. There we go. Next step is to add in hair on the other side, we're going to go into top view and then start adding in the hair over here. So what I'll do is I'll click on the add of brush tool. I'm going to turn off children. And for this part, I want to basically add in the same amount of hair going across this way. So I'll zoom in and start placing it. I'll place on there. And also make sure interpellate is turned off. Place one, they're there, and just go down the line until it's about the same same amount of hair, probably like this. There you go. Once you've had all of those hairs, will select them by holding L. And I'll just drag over them to select them all that we go just like that. Then we'll go into front view by pressing one and add some link to it. So we'll click on the length of brush and click and drag. Next up, selected the cone brush and start placing it in the spot. So we'll drag it down. Don't worry about the length for now. We'll fix that in just a second. I'll go back and the front view, we'll drag this side up and place it like this. And we go, go into side view by pressing control three, this will put you in this side, so the right side is the front. Now, we'll drag it forward and then we'll drag this side back. Then of course we need to trim this up so we can click on the link tool. If you hold Shift, I'll just trim all of this up. Just like this, that we go trim that up. Then we'll select become brush one more time and drag all the bottom hair forward. Just slightly like this way. This way. Once you're happy with the shape, you can enable children again to take a look at it. And as you can see, that does look pretty good. Next up we have one more spot in the back right here. There's this empty spot. And all we have to do here is just kind of blend these two lengths. So you can see this side's going to the left or to the right, and this side's going to the left. So we need to blend these together. And it looks like we have one strand that's kind of sticking out. So over on this side, I'll just press all day to de-select that side and just kind of fix actually all control x2 that I'll select these three hairs. Not that one will select this one. Nope, not down either. Come on. This one. There we go. And I'll just fix that in my dragon that forward down like that. And then we'll turn that up by selecting the link tool shift will turn that up. So what I'll do is I'll go into back view by hitting control one on my number pad and start adding in hair along this side. So we'll add in the brush tool right here, the ad brush, and then click right about there. And we'll just go along this way. That looks pretty good. And then from here we'll go into side view by pressing three. There's holding l will select all of them. Then of course, using the cone brush tool will drag them down and then add some link to them as well to make them a little bit longer. So select the length of brush tool and click and drag. Then it's just the same process of coming into place, trimming it up once you have the right length will go into back view control one. And for right here, I kind of want them to follow this type of hair. So we're going to drag this this way and kind of have them follow it, something like this. Don't over on this side, we'll drag it over to the right a little bit. And as just styling of the hair to your liking. So something like that is good. There we go. Not too bad. And then for right here we'll trim this up. So select the link tool holding Shift, and you can also use the Cut tool if you want to. I like using the link as I think gives you a little bit more control. So you can see we can cut it to about that length. Not too bad. We'll go into Siberia but pressing three and then comment into place. So click and drag this way. And there we go. Let's take a look at it with the children on by clicking that children button. And there we go. We've now created the hair that is looking pretty good from here, you can style it how you want just pressing using the cone brush tool. You can style it however you want. If you want the outside to be proved out a little bit, something like that, do whatever you want. It's totally up to you. And actually I think I like that, so I'll drag it out just slightly like this. Go into the back view, maybe out this way. I think that looks pretty good. Not too bad. So there you go. We've now created the hair, and in the next video we will start to add in some highlights. 45. Creating Hair P2 Adding Highlights: We have finished the Bass Model for our hair, and the next step is to add in a couple of highlights to make some of the strands stand out. To do this, we're going to create a new particle system. So come up here, hit the plus sign, switch it over to hair. And then of course we're going to hold on. Let's get out of the particle edit mode. We're going to set the number two is 0 and the length of that will leave at four. For now it's perfectly fine. And underneath the children's section, we're also going to turn this on. And then we'll play around with these settings in just a second. Let's first add in some hair. So we're gonna go over to the object mode, click on particle edit. And we're gonna add in some highlights going following this length of the hair. What I'll do is I'll just go to the ad and then I'll click right about here where this part starts. There we go. So now that we have a little bit of hair, let's mess around with the children's section. For the display amount, we're going to bring that up to 100 and refresh this. We can uncheck and recheck children or go over to the object modes, we can see it in real time. And another thing that we're gonna do with this hair is actually make it come to a point. This is pretty easy. If we open up the clumping section, we can open up the US AT curve option here and then we can play around with the curve. So if we look at this, this endpoint right here, if I drag this lower, it will actually become a point. If I drag this side lower, the bottom part will become a point as well. So we're gonna go right about here, and then we're going to also give this a slight curve. So you can see it kind of curves it like this. And I think that looks pretty good. And I'd probably want to go right about there, so about halfway down. And then this side will be a curve. And then also the radius, this controls the radius of the hair. We're going to drag this down to probably, let's go with 0.1 for now. And I think I'm happy with that result, maybe slightly lower. Let's go 0.07. Now the next step is to just place it inside the hair. So what we can do is go back over to the particle edit, start combing it into place. Let's refresh that by unchecking and rechecking children. Then go into front view. The amount right here is set to ten, which is fine. Also double-check that the path steps is six. And then over n at the viewport display will bring the strand steps up to four or five and then turn on B spline and bring that up to four as well. For the comb, we're going to select the cone brush and just start moving it into place. There we go, you can see it starting to move. And at this part is a little bit hard. Sometimes the cone doesn't really work and it might lag your viewport so you can set the display amount to a little bit lower. Let's go with 50, uncheck and recheck to refresh it. And hopefully that will smooth it out. And he got so basically all you really need to do is start placing the hair and the spot. And also we can't really see it. So what we're gonna do now is actually add a material so we can see it in the viewport really easily. If we go over to the material tab, we can create a new material. This will be the main hair will call it main. Then we'll add in a another material by hitting that plus sign, we'll click on new and we'll call this material highlights. If we scroll down to the viewport display, we can change the color of it. So let's go with a blue color so we can see it. Then we'll jump back over to the particle tab. And for the material, select highlights. Once we do that, we can see it in our scene and now it's much easier to work with. So we'll go back into front view and just start placing this in the same spot. So drag this down and it is a little bit too long. So we'll grab that the length brush holding Shift, I'll just trim that up slightly. Comb brush, drag it down. Over on this side, we're going to drive the whole thing up so we can actually see it. It's not inside the other hair. There we go, drag it out a little bit. And there we go. We've added a little bit of a highlights. So we'll drag it to the front slightly. We'll go into sideview, but pressing three and just drag it and place it how you want. If you want the highlight to be bigger and just go over to the children's section and then turn up the radius. So if I bring the radius backup to 0.1. we uncheck and then recheck children should refresh it. We now have a slightly bigger Highlight. And I think that looks a little bit better actually. So we'll leave it at 0.1 for the radius. And then maybe right here we'll add a little bit of flair just to kinda like push it out, something like that. Play around with it, do whatever style that you want. So there you go. We've added in one highlight and now let's do the rest of them. You understand how to do one. So now I'm going to fast forward this part and added a couple more highlights around the hair. Also one more thing to note, if you want to just edit this header, you can just select it so you don't mess with this one here and then start coming into place. And there we go. We've got added in the highlights and I think it looks pretty good. We have one here on the left and then two on the right, just to give it some variation in the hair. I think it looks pretty good. 46. Creating Hair P3 Adjusting the Hair: Our h