Transcripts
1. Blender Particles Masterclass: Introduction: Hey, and welcome to this
Blender Particles Masterclass. Are you ready to take
your Blender skills to the next level in this course will explore the fascinating world of
particle simulations. Together we'll dive deep
into the exciting realm of particles and unleash
your creativity in ways you never
thought possible. Throughout this
course, we'll cover a wide range of topics, ensuring you gain a
thorough understanding of particle simulations
in Blender, you'll learn how to create your first basic
particle simulation. Make particles
follow a curve using forces and collision objects to create dynamic simulations. How to create realistic
rain using particles. Add cinematic dust
to your renders, populate your scenes with lifelike grass and
other objects, and even creating
debris explosions using particle systems
and much more. Finally, we will combine everything we've
learned to create a final product pack-shot
render with swirling Particles. This course is designed for both Blender
Beginners as well as more experienced Blender users who are interested in using particle simulations to take their renders to the next level. I'm also including all
the Blender project files for you to have a look at. I can't wait to see what amazing particle
simulations you'll create. See you in the first lesson
2. Lesson 01: Create Your First Basic Particle Simulation: Hi and welcome to
the first lesson. So as you can see, I am using Blender version 3.6, 0.0 for this course, but you can follow along in
any other version of Blender. So first of all, let's begin by looking at the very basics of particle
systems inside of Blender. I'm going to show
you how to create a very basic particle
system just to get started. And then we slowly
going to be creating more complex and more
advanced particle systems going through this course. So let's begin by deleting
everything in the scene. So simply press a on the keyboard to select
all the objects, and then press X and then click Delete to delete everything. Now we need something
to emit our Particles, and that's called the
Particle Emitter. Now, a Particle Emitter
can be any object or mesh. So let's create something that will be our
Particle Emitter. So I'm going to press Shift
a to bring up the Add menu. And then we're gonna go to Mesh. And let's choose an Ico severe
as our Particle Emitter. The particles will be
emitted from this object. Let's move it up a bit
so it's not sitting on the grid with this
Ico sphere selected. Press G on the
keyboard for grab, and then press Z to
lock it on the z-axis. So just move it up so
it's kinda sitting above the grid,
something like that. And yeah, that
looks pretty good. So let's add our first
Particle System. So make sure you Ico sphere selected with this orange
outline around it. And then we're gonna go to this Particles tab
here on the side. This is where we can add
our particle systems. So we simply going to click on the little plus to create
our new Particle System. And here you can rename it. You can also hide it from the viewport or hide
it from there render. So to rename our
particle system, simply double-click on it and
then we can call it maybe something like my
Particle System. You can give it a name. This is just kinda to keep
everything nice and neat if you have more than one
Particle System in your scene. So if we press Space now, Make sure you're on
frame number one, year at the bottom
in this timeline. So just make sure you're
on frame number one. And if we press Space, we're going to preview
our Simulation. And as you can see, the
particles are being emitted from this ecosphere. And they fall down
because we have gravity enabled in
the scene by default. So let's stop that by
pressing space again. Then a quick shortcut to
go back to the first frame is Shift and left
arrow on the keyboard. You can also use these
controls right here. So this one right here will take you back to
frame number one, or you can simply just use the shortcut Shift
and left arrow. So always make sure you play your simulation from frame one. If you start the simulation, maybe from frame 50 at
might not work correctly because it's not calculating
those first 50 frames. So always make sure you're
on frame number one and then preview the Simulation. Alright, so let's
go through some of the basic parameters that we can change to create
our particle systems. So with our Particle Emitter selected here under Particles, this is where we're going to
go through all the settings. So just something
to keep in mind when we go through
all these settings, there's quite a lot of things. You are a lot of
parameters and it can get confusing pretty quickly. Try and minimize them
every time you can. Move on to the next section. Because if you have
them all open at, can be very overwhelming
and also very confusing. Just going through
all these settings. So I recommend you
can just try and keep them minimized as
we go through them. That will just make
things a bit easier. So first we have the
emission section, and this is where you can
change the number of particles. The frame start and end when the particles are born
and when they die. And then you also
have the lifetime of your Particles and
lifetime randomness. So if I play this back now, this is creating or
emitting 1,000 Particles. And it's starting to emit the first particle
from frame one. And the last particle will
be emitted at frame 200. So if we change this number
to maybe something like 100, we press Space again. Now it will only generate
or emit 100 particles. You can see the Particles
are a lot less. If we increase this
to maybe 10,000, then we're gonna get
a lot more Particles. So let's leave this
on 1,000 for now. And let's see what
happens when we change the frame start and frame end. So if I change the end
to something like 20, that means it's
going to emit all 1,000 Particles
between frame 1.20. So if we press Space now, you can see the particles
are being emitted. And then right off the frame 20, you can see the particles are not being emitted any longer. We can also make this like, almost like an
explosion if we bring this in number down
to maybe like three. So that means it's going
to release or Emitter all 1,000 Particles in the
first three frames. So that you can see
we have a little bit more of a Explosion. So all those particles being emitted almost
instantaneously. We can also adjust the
lifetime of our Particles. So let's say we bring
this down to maybe 20. They will only be on screen for 20 frames before they disappear. We can also give the lifetime
summer randomness if we increase this lifetime
randomness number. And now you'll see they won't disappear exactly
at the same time. If we want to keep
our Particles on screen for the entire duration, then we can just
increase this lifetime. So currently my timeline is set to 250 frames
here at the bottom. So if I set the lifetime to 250 and I set the
randomness to zero, that means the particles
will be on screen for a full 250 frames. So if we play that back,
you will see our Particles. We'll just kinda keep on falling until we can't
see them anymore, but they will still be there. So let's change our
end number again to something like 100s so we don't release them all
at the same time. So we get something like that where particles
cannot just fall down. And then off to frame 100, you can see they stop emitting. Alright, so next we have source. And by the way, we're just gonna go over some of the basics now we're not going to cover
every single parameter. We're going to touch on
them during the course. So under source, you
will find emit from, and you can choose
from three options, vertices, faces or volume. Now by default,
this is city faces, and this means particles will be emitted from the
faces of our object. So each face will
emit some particles. As you can see that if we
change this to vertices, that means the particles
will be emitted from these vertices
on our object. Now to see these vertices, I'm simply pressing tab on the keyboard to go
into edit mode. Or you can just use a strap
down here at the top to switch between object
mode and edit mode. Then if you press one on the keyboard inside
of edit mode, we will see the vertices. If we press two, we will see the edges. And then if we press three, we can select the faces. So this just means that
the particles will be emitted now from the vertices
instead of the phases. So if we press Space
to preview that, you can see that the simulation does look a little
bit different. You can see the particles
are actually being emitted from the vertices and
not from the phases. And then thirdly,
we have volume. So let's go back to
the first frame. Let's change this to volume. And this means it's going
to emit particles from the complete volume
of this object. Now it's a little bit
difficult to see. But if we switch over to wireframe here at
the top you can see the particles are being
emitted from inside our mesh. So Using the volume
basically of the mesh. Now by default, I'm going to
leave this on faces for now. That just kinda
works really well. Can see they emitted
from the outside faces. And let's switch
back to solid view. Next we have used
modifier stack. And this only means, let's say we have some modifiers
on our Emitter object. So under the
modifiers panel year, let's say we have maybe
a subdivision surface and maybe some other
types of modifiers. Then basically this means
the modifiers will be applied first before the
particle simulation. So don't worry too
much about that. We don't have any modifiers
on this Particle Emitter, so we can just leave that off. Next we have the distribution, so you can choose between
jittered, random and grid. Now by default, I usually just
use jittered if I go for, if I want to go
for a random look. You can also try random, which is a little bit
of a different type of random, very similar. And then you can also choose Grid which is very different, that kinda releases them
in a specific order. But by default, icon I
like to use jittered. That's very, a very random look. And I think that just
works quite well. Okay, let's minimize
the source and emission and let's look at some of these other parameters. Next we have cash, and this is where we will
bake our simulation once we are 100% happy
with the simulation. So we're not going
to bake right now. So just know that this is
something that we can do when we are finished or
happy with our simulation. Then we can save it basically
to memory or to disk. And then it won't
have to calculate that simulation every time
you play your animation. So that's just
something to know. And then next is a very
important parameter section, and this is the velocity
of the Particles. Now by default,
you'll see that the normal is set to one
meters per second. The normal direction is
the normal of each face. That face will have a direct, a normal direction
going this way. All these faces facing outwards. We can actually visualize
the direction of the normals by going into edit
mode by pressing Tab. And then make sure you
in face select mode by pressing three. And then here at the top, if you click on this drop-down, you can click this little normal display normals
button right here. And this will just show you the direction of these phases. You can see they're all
kinda pointing outwards. And that's just the direction or the normals of these phases. So let's able that we
don't want to see that. And it's press Tab to go
back into object mode. And let's see what
we can do here. If we increase this number, this normal velocity, maybe
to something like five. Let's play that back. Now you can see our particles are shooting out a little bit further because we increase
the velocity of that normal. Let's maybe try a value of
ten and see what happens. Press Space, and I can see
they shooting out quite far. So let's bring that back
to around maybe three. Yeah, that's looking
pretty cool. And then what we can
do is we can also change the velocity of
the different axes. So let's say we want to shoot the particles in a specific
axes or direction. Let's say we want to shoot
it in the x-direction. I'm going to increase
this to be maybe five. I can see the particles
are shooting in the positive X
direction of x-axis. I'm going to bring
this normal value to zero just for now. So we can just see
this a little better. There you can see our
particles are shooting on the x-direction or
towards the x-direction. So this red line here, That's your X axis. The Y is the green line. And then we also have Z, which is up and down. So we can also enter a
negative number here. If I make this minus
five on the X, Let's play that back. Now you can see it's going
the other direction. We can do the same
with a, Y and Z. So I'm going to
set the X to zero. Let's try on the Z, maybe, maybe
something like five. And I can see the
particles are shooting upwards and then they fall
down because of gravity. We can also do a negative
number here, maybe minus five. That means it's just going
to shoot down at 5 m/s. So we can also add some
randomized to our velocity. So let's say we are
shooting our Particles in the z-direction at 10
m/s upwards like that. But I want to add a
little bit of variation. So we can increase this
randomized number two, maybe something like two. And I can see our
particles are not shooting up perfectly,
just straight up. It's kinda going in
different directions. If we increase this
number two, maybe five, then you can see that effect
is a lot more random. So we can maybe bring
the Z back to zero, and then let's set the
normal back to maybe five. Now you can see that we have some random particles or random velocities shooting
out in all directions. So if we look at the difference, if we set randomized to zero, then we get something like that. And if we increase the
randomized two, maybe three. And you can see it's a
little bit more random. Then there's also an
object velocity here. And this means that if we have
a moving Particle Emitter, it will actually
use the movement of that Animation to drive the
velocity of the Particles. Next, we have a rotation and we're going to come back
to this one in a little bit because currently
our particles are just these round spheres and we won't be able to see any
rotation on them currently. Just minimize that for now. Next we have physics, and this is where you can set your physics type between
these different types, but I usually just
keep it on Newtonian. You can also set
some forces here, deflection, integration
and integration. You can set the
different algorithms for the physics simulation, but I usually just leave it
on mid point as default. So don't worry too
much about these. We might look at them
a little bit later. So I'm going to minimize
the physics section. And next we're gonna
go to rerender, which is also a very
important section. You can change the
look of the Particles. So let's say we don't want
these little severe Particles, but we want to use an actual
object as our Particles This is where we change it. So let's create a new object in our scene by
pressing Shift a. And let's create a simple cube. So go to Mesh and
then click on cube. And it's going to
create this cube in the middle of our scene. Now let's just move
it another way. So I'm going to
press G to grab it, and then x2 move it on the
x-direction or the x-axis, and just place it
somewhere off to the side. Now we have this cube
in our scene as well. Let's rename this cube to just to keep our
scene organised. So in the outliner you can see we've got the cube
and the ecosphere. And I'm simply going to
double-click on a cube and let's call it cube particle. Just like that. You can give it any
name is just to keep things nice and tidy so we
know what's going on inosine. So let's click on our
Particle Emitter again. And now if we go to
the render section, I'm going to change
this render as Halo. Just click the drop-down, and I'm going to
change this to object. Now there's a few options
here, but for now, let's just set this
to Object because we want to use an object
as the particle. Then below that, we've got a
drop-down that says object. And you, you can choose which object you want to
use as the particle. So you can simply click
on this box and you can select the object
from this list, or you can use this
little dropper, select the cube in the viewport. Now, if we play this back, you will see our particles are now these small
little cubes. So we can change the scale. So if we increase this number, you can see it's increasing
the scale of those Particles. And then we can also
introduce some randomness. So let's just set this to
one for a nice random scale. Let's play that back
from the beginning. So I'm gonna go back to
frame one, press Space. And I can see we have
these nice cube particles coming out of the
Particle Emitter. Now under objects, you
can see three tick boxes, global coordinates,
object rotation, and also Objects scale. By default, only the object
scale will be ticked. And that means you
can actually click on the cube object and
you can scale it. And the particles will actually be affected
by that scale. If we rotate this cube, nothing will happen
because we're not using the object
rotation right here. We can tick this box and then we can rotate
this cube around. And you can see all the cubes or the Particle cubes
are rotating as well, but they're all rotating
at exactly the same angle. So that's not really
what we want. So I'm gonna leave
this off as default. We also have something
called global coordinates. If we take this, you'll see the
particles will move where our actual
Particle objectives. So if I move this around, you can see the
particles follow that. But that's not
something we want. We want our Particles
team at from our Emitter. So I'm going to disable that. Then just something
very quickly. And the extra, you
will see parent Particles unborn and dead. So just know that you can
select if you want to see parent particles when we look at the children Particles later on, you can also show unborn. So if I take that and I
go back to frame one, you can see all the
Particles kinda being stuck together around
the Particle Emitter. They will start to imagine
fall often kind of disappear. If that's something you want, you can enable the unborn
Particles right here. And the same with
dead particles. So if we go back to emission and we set the lifetime
of our Particles, do something like 50. Now those particles
won't disappear, but they will just freeze
in place. They go. So you can see that
just freezing in place on their last frame, and that's what
that option does. So let's change the
lifetime back to 250, so our Particles stay on
screen for the full duration. Then let's see what
other parameters there is. Under render. You also have an option to
show or to hide the Emitter. Now, if we uncheck this box, then it means that
our Particle Emitter, the ecosphere, will not be
visible in the final render. It will still be visible
in the viewport, but not in the render. So just note that
that option easier. Let's minimize a
render and let's move on to viewport display. Now, you can select the
showing mature as well. So if I untick this
under viewport, then if I play the simulation, you can see that the Particle Emitter is no longer there,
it's kinda hidden. You can see the outline
of that I ecosphere. So that's just if you
don't want to see the Particle Emitter
inside of the viewport. You can also change the number
of particles that you see. You can see this is
currently set to 100 and we can bring this down maybe to
something like ten per cent. If you have a lot
of particles in your scene and your
viewport is really slow, then this is just something
that will help you with speeding up the viewport. Just note that it says
Display Percentage makes Dynamics inaccurate
without baking So that means we need to
bake our simulation on 100 per cent visible Particles and then off to our Baikal. Once we've saved that
cash to memory Autodesk, then we can bring this down
to increase the speed. So that's just
something to note. So another thing that you can do under view-port
display is you can change the way that the particles are being
displayed in the viewport. So by default, this is set
to display as rendered, which means we will
see the particles as they will render
in our final render. Or we can change this to maybe points just to have
these round points. Or we can change the two circles to have these little circles. Or we can change it
to cross or axes. Now these are just
kinda just how to preview them in the viewport. It's not going to change
your final render, but it might help speed
up your viewport if you Using a very complex
Particle mesh. So that's just something to keep in mind that you can change it here under the
viewport display. So I'm going to set this
back to your renders so we can see our little cubes. Alright, so next
let's see how we can rotate these Particles,
because as you can see, they all kinda rotate it in exactly the same way as
our main particle object. So let's see what we can
do if I enable rotation, and let's just expand this. We can introduce some
randomness to that rotation. Now let's go back
to the first frame and play our simulation again. Now you can see our cubes
are rotated randomly. You can also see that they
stay in that specific angle. They don't change, they're
not spinning really. And we can introduce
some spin by enabling this dynamic
box under rotation. So let's play our
simulation again. And I will see the boxes
will actually spin as they shoot out from
the Particle Emitter. And that's kinda just Using Dynamics To calculate
that rotation. We can also introduce
some extra spin to our particles if we
expand angular velocity, if we increase this
number to maybe 20. Now you can see that our
particles are actually spinning in a
specific direction. Let's bring this
down to maybe five. And you can see they
spending a bit slower. So for now, I'm just
going to set this to zero because we have this
dynamic rotation on, which looks pretty cool I think, and it's very like
a natural rotation. Alright, so let's
minimize rotation and let's quickly see
if there's anything else we can have a look at. So children we will look
at a little bit later That's to create
children Particles. We've got three options, none simple and
interpellate nannies, no children Particles. And then we get simple, which is a few particles
for each parent particle. Interpolator is
something that we will use with Hair
Particles later on. Just something to note
right here at the top. Under our particle system, we have two options
here, Emitter and Hair. And these are the two
different particle types. So currently it's
set to Emitter. And later on in this
course we will look at the Hair Particles System. Now the interpellate it children will be used when we Using
the Hair Particles System. So don't worry too much
about this for now. I just want to
mention that we do have this option right here. So let's minimize the
children's section, and let's quickly look
at the field weights. So this is where you can
control the influence of these specific field or
forces on the Particles. So currently we don't have
any of these forces like vortex or wind or
turbulence in our scene, but we do have gravity. As you can see, our
boxes are falling down. What we can do is we can
set this gravity to zero. Now you can see we don't have
any gravity in the scene. The particles are kind of
just shooting outwards and they just floating
away in space. We can also introduce a
negative number here. So if we set this to minus one, that will invert our gravity. Now gravity will pull upwards, which can create
quite a cool effect. You can also make it
something like ten. So that's will be a
gravity of times ten. And I can see our
particles are being pulled down really, really fast. So for now, let's just leave
this on default gravity one. And that will give us our
normal gravity again. So just know that we can
change the influence of these field weights
of forces right here. We also have
force-field settings, and this is where we can add some force fields right
here from the drop-downs. But we will look at a
different way to add Forces to our scene at a
later stage in this course. So for now, just know that
you can do that there. And then we also have
something called vertex groups that we will
look at later as well. And this is where
you can control different parts of
your Particle Emitter. Let's say you only
want Particles to emit from a certain amount of faces. That's where we can control it, right here, and
density, etcetera. But we're going
to look at that a little bit later as well. We also have textures. It's kinda similar to the vertex groups that
if we want to control the density using
a specific texture or the speed of our Particles, but using a specific texture. So don't worry about
this too much for now. We will look at that in
a later lesson as well. So for now, just play
around with the basics. Create some Particles
shooting out of a Particle Emitter and play around with the way that
the Particles look. You can maybe try something else instead of a cube and
see how that looks. And just play around until
you are familiar with the basic settings that we
went over in this lesson. Let's go ahead and
save our project now. So press File, Save As, then give it a name yet the
bottom and press Save As. And that's just going
to save our project so we can use it later on. So play around hyphen and I will see you
in the next lesson.
3. Lesson 02: Particle Emitter Follow a Curve: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going
to look at how we can animate our Particle Emitter
along a path. So let's say we have
a path or a Curve, and we want our Particle
Emitter to follow that path as it's
emitting the Particles. So let's see how we can do that. Let's begin by deleting everything in our
scene by pressing a and X on the keyboard and then click Delete to
delete everything. Now let's begin by creating
our Particle Emitter. So for this one, I'm going
to press Shift a mesh. For this, let's create an ecosphere again as
our Particle Emitter. Now we can move it up again if we want to, doesn't
really matter. We'll probably move it into position once we have our Curve. Next, let's add our
Particles System without Particle
Emitter selected, go to Particles see on
the right-hand side, and then click the Plus to
create that Particle System. Now, if we play, you'll see we have these default particles coming out of our Particle Emitter, and that's exactly what we want. Let's go back to
the first frame. And now we need to
create a Curve object or a path so that our Emitter
can follow that path. So to do that, let's
press Shift a. Then you'll see Curve. Now I have a lot more options here because of
Add-on installed, but more on that later. So for now we simply
going to create a Bezier curve object. And that's going to create it right in the middle
of your scene. You can see it created this orange line and
that's our Curve object. To change the curve
with it selected press Tab to go into edit mode. And now you can
change these points. You can see it's
got one point on this side and it's got
one point on this side. And you can move them around
by selecting that point, pressing G on the keyboard, and then kind of just
moving it around. You can also rotate it, each of these points. Or you can even rotate or
move these handles as well. So I can select this
handle, press G, move it around, and kinda
create my own curve. We can also extrude more points. If I select this point and I press E on the keyboard,
E for extrude. You can see it's
going to extrude a new point from that point. Now we can rotate this. I can also scale this
to change that Curve. And I can maybe go to this point and then
press E to extrude. And maybe let's just try and create an interesting
looking Curve. So you can also move these
points around in 3D space. So as you rotate around, kinda just position them
the way you want to. Let's just create something that's a little bit interesting. So I'm going to scale
that one up just to increase that curve right there. And maybe let's do one
more extrusion year. Let's rotate this
around and scale it up. Now we have this crazy
looking both in our scene. Let's just scale this
one up as well to just smooth out that
corner slightly. Alright, so once you're
happy with your curve, press Tab to go back
into object mode. Let's first increase the
resolution of our curve. You can see some of these
corners are quite jagged. So I want to add more points
to just smooth that out. And it's really easy to do with your Curve objects selected. Go to the data property, see on the side this
little Curve icon. And then you can increase the resolution preview
units right here. So you can see if
I bring this down, it will be more jagged. And as I increase it at
volt, smooth it out. Let's just zoom in here so
you can see this better. So they can see if we bring
this down more jagged, if we increase, it, just
creates a smoother curve. Alright, so I'm happy
with around 47. And that looks like a
nice and smooth curve. What we can also do is
we can scale our Curve. So just an object mode. You can scale the complete curve up if it's slightly too small, and we can go back into
edit mode if we want to change any of these points. Alright, so for now, I think
let's leave it as that. So now we want our Emitter
to follow this curve. So the Emitter should
start maybe on this side, on this side, and it should
just kinda follow that curve. So really easy to do with our
Particle Emitter selected. We're going to go
to the constraints, Abby, On the right-hand side. And then we're going to
click this drop-down and we're going to
select follow path. So this is a follow
path constraint. Alright, so now what
we can do is we can select a target curve. So click on the little dropper. And here we're going to
select our Curve object. I can see our Emitter actually jumped to the starting position. And it's got this relationship
line just showing that it's linked to this curve. Now, if I play this back, nothing will happen
because we need to animate that path
movement or the Animation Now this is called the offset. So if I decrease
this offset number, you can see that our Emitter
is now following the path, but it's far above
the actual curve. And that's because we moved
our Emitter at the beginning. We moved it up on the z-axis. But it's really
easy to fix that. We can simply just move it down. So with our Emitter selected, I'm gonna go and
look at this from the front by pressing on
the x-axis right here. So we'll look at this
straight from the front. And with our Emitter selected, I'm going to press G
to move it around. And I'm somebody just
gonna move it down. So it's at the point of
the start of that curve. Let's look at it from the Y side and maybe let's
enable wireframe so we can see exactly where the
center of this Emitter 0s. So now I'm just going
to rotate around it and kinda just try and
get it into place. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just so it's at the starting
point of that curve. Alright, so let's switch
back to Solid View. Now, if we scrub this offset, you can see that our
Particle Emitter is now following the curve. So what we're gonna do, we're going to create
two keyframes. Let's go back to
frame one and make sure this offset is set to zero. And on frame one, we're going to set a keyframe
for this value offset. So to do that, you can
simply just hover over this number and press I on the keyboard for
insert keyframe. Or you can simply just
click this little dot next to this number and that will
insert a keyframe for you. You can also see the keyframe
has been created here on frame number one
in the timeline. So now we can scrub maybe
to frame number 100. And then we want to set another
keyframe on this offset, but this time with a value
of -100 or negative 100. And that's going to take us to the end point of this curve. Alright, so make sure you're
on frame number 100 year, Make sure you're offset
ACE2, negative 100. And then we're going to
click this little diamond next to it, insert
another keyframe. So now if we go
back to frame one and we press Space
to play this back, you can see that our Emitter
is now following that curve. If I scrub through this, you will see that our
Emitter is not really rotating as it's
following the path. It's kinda just moving up, down, left and right. So we can change
this by enabling this Follow a Curve
box right here. And now if we play this back, you will see that the
emitters actually rotating as it's kinda
following that curve around. So if we play this back, we will get a much more
natural rotation or movement. You can also not
change the speed of that Animation by just
adjusting these two keyframes. So I can grab this
keyframe on frame 100 and press G to
move it around. And I can move it to frame
200 and play that back for a slower Animation because
it's not going to take 200 frames from the beginning
to the end of the curve. We can obviously also
increase that speed by bringing this keyframe
closer to maybe, let's put it on frame 50. And let's give that applying. Now I can see it's
moving really fast. Now we can go and we can
play with our Particles. So let's go back to the
particle tab and let's increase the number
two, maybe 10,000. Now you can see we have a lot
of particles being emitted and it's emitted
until frame 200. You can see there
we've got our frame start and frame end. Now let's say we
want our Particles to stop emitting at frame 50. As it gets to the
end of this curve, we can simply set this
frame start and end to 50, so it's 1-50 and a
lifetime will be 50. So they will all disappear when it gets
here. So let's have a look. There we go. And let's increase
the lifetime to 250 so that they are
always onscreen. Cool. So now I can see that
following our path and they've pulling down and
everything is looking cool. So now we can obviously add some velocity randomness to maybe just change
the way this looks. It looks very uniform. So I'm going to minimize the emission section and
let's go to velocity. And let's increase the
randomness here at the bottom to maybe
something like maybe two. Now you can see we get
it a little bit of a more random movement there. So next, let's have a look at the object velocity
that I mentioned a bit earlier here under
the velocity section. So if we increase the object velocity to let say one and it's play that back. You can see that our particles
are being moved around as our severe or as the
Particle Emitter goes around these corners and you can kinda see
what it's doing. It's going to influencing the
velocity of the Particles. If I set this back to zero
and play this back again, you can see the particles
are kind of just doing Something like that. And if we increase
this to one again, you can see the difference. It's basically just
taking the velocity of the Emitter and then it's
applying that to the Particles. We can also set this
object velocity to a negative number. So let's try negative one. And now if we play this back, you can see it kinda shooting
in the other direction. So a value of one is
definitely more realistic. If you want something
a little bit less, we can decrease this to
maybe something like 0.4. That will give us
a little bit of a more natural movement. Right? So that's how easily is to have your Particle Emitter
following a specific, both. Play around and see what you can create and save your
project once you've done. And then I will see you
in the next lesson.
4. Lesson 03: Particles Follow a Curve: Hey and welcome back. In this lesson, we're gonna
look at how we can have our particles follow a path. Now in the previous lesson, we looked at how we can make the Particle Emitter moving
along a specific path. And in this lesson
we actually going to take the Particles and make them follow a
path or a Curve. So first of all, let's
start with a blank scene. And then we're going to
delete everything by pressing a and X and then click Delete, so we have a blank scene. So let's start off by creating our Particle
Emitter first. So shift a mesh, add for this one,
we're going to go with the ecosphere again. So maybe let's just move that up a bird so we have some space underneath it and it's
add our particle system. So under Particles, let's
click the little plus. And now we have our
Basic Particle System. Now the only thing I want to
change your is the lifetime. I don't want them to disappear halfway through the animation. So let's increase
the lifetime to 250, so that our particles
will stay on screen for all the duration
of the 250 frames. Alright, let's create
the Curve object that our particles
are going to follow. So in the viewport, press Shift a and then we're
gonna go to curve again, and then this time Bezier. Now let's scale it up
a bit by pressing S on a keyboard and just moving
the mouse outwards. And then let's go into
edit mode so we can add and just change
some of these points around with the Curve object selected press tab
on the keyboard. And now we can start
moving these points around by selecting them and
pressing G on the keyboard. Obviously, you can also
rotate them and scale them by pressing R and S. So let's take this point, Let's move it up maybe. And let's extrude that point by pressing E to extrude
another point. And let's rotate that
around by pressing R. Let's scale it by pressing
S. And maybe let's scale this one as well so
that corner is not too sharp. And maybe let's extrude
some more points here. So we have a little bit of a more interesting
looking curve. So just move around in 3D space and just move these
points around, rotate them, scale them, extrude them, until you have a curve that looks
quite interesting, maybe something like that. Alright, Let's just increase. This one's slightly,
alright, so as you can see, our curve is a
little bit jagged, so let's add some resolution to that with a Curve selected. Click on the Data icon
here on the side, and then let's increase the
resolution to around 64. That should smooth
it out quite a bit. You can see that's a lot better. Now what we wanna do is let's move our Particle
Emitter so it's a little bit closer to the starting
point of this curve. So there are particles. They can maybe fall
down a little bit, and then they can start following the curve all
the way to the end. So let's have a look
at the direction of our Curve object. So select the Curve object, go into edit mode
by pressing tab. Then click on this little drop-down right here at the top, and then go all the way
down and enable this normal or this box
next two normals. You can also increase the size. And this will just show you
the direction of your curve. It's going to add
these little arrows. And as you can see there, we can now see that our curve
is actually going this way. And we want our Particles to
start here by the Emitter, follow the curve going that way. So we need to change or switch the direction of the curve. Really easy to do that, we can simply just
select all the points by pressing a and then right-click. And then we're going to
choose switch direction. Now you need to do this
while you are in edit mode. I don't think we can do
this in object mode. Now we've gotten,
so you have to be in edit mode and a tab, select the points, right-click and then
switched direction. Now you can see the arrows are showing the other
way or the normals. So the direction of our curve is now going the correct way. Let's press Tab to go
back into object mode. Now if we play back our
animation, nothing will happen. Our Particles will
just fall down, but they won't be
attracted by this curve. So we basically need to convert this curve into a
force-field object. Now it's really easy to do. So we're going to
select our Curve. And then we're gonna go to the Physics tab beyond
the right-hand side. With at Curve still selected, we're going to click
on force-field. And that's going to create a
force field from this curve. Now, if we play this back
now, nothing really happens. You can see they kinda
wanna go this way, but nothing really happens. And that's because the shape is currently set to zero point We want to change this to Curve. So it's not just using
one point in space, but it's using the full
curve as a force-field. Just change this shape you on the right-hand side to Curve. And then we also
need to increase the power of this false, because we want to
attract our Particles, we need to sit a negative
value right here. So let's start
with negative ten. See how that works. And then let's press Space
to play the animation. Now you can see
something is happening. It's kinda attracting
the Particles, but they just keep
on falling down so it's not strong enough. Let's increase this or decrease
this value to maybe -50. And let's see what happens. Now. You can see the particles are going all over the place, but they're not really
sticking to the curve. And that's this number right
here, the flow number. So if we increase this number, maybe all the way to ten. Now you can see
our particles are sticking perfectly
to that curve, and that's also not
something we want. We want something that's loosely just sending the Particles
around this curve. So let's decrease the flow
number two, maybe three. And let's see how that looks. You can see it's still a
little bit strong the flow. So let's decrease
this to maybe one. So we've got a -50 or negative 50 strength and
a flow of one. Let's see. As you can see, that's
looking pretty cool. We can maybe just
move our Emitter closer to the start
of this curve. So I'm simply just going to
move it down and just rotate around and position
it into place. Alright, let's have a look. Now. You can also
control the speed of which these particles are actually following the curve. And that is the strength mounts. So if we change this to negative
100, let's have a look. Now you can see they are
moving a lot faster. We can also decrease
the flow maybe to 0.5 to have a little bit
of a looser flow around the curve as
you can see there. And because we're
going really fast, they can overshooting on the corners, which
is quite nice. Let's decrease the string to maybe -30. Let's
see what we get. Yeah, that's looking
pretty cool. Maybe we can increase
the flow slightly to one again and
see what we get. It's always good practice just to play with these numbers. Anytime you change the strength, you might need to
adjust the flow again. So maybe let's decrease
the strength to -40 and let's set
the flow to 0.8. There we go. That's giving us a nice natural flow of
particles around this curve. And now we can obviously
go ahead and we can increase the number
of particles. So if we click on the
Particle Emitter, I'm going to increase the
number two, maybe 10,000. Let's see what we get. The cool thing about this as now you can click on the Curve, go into edit mode, and we can move
these points around and just run our simulation. And the particles will now
follow that new Curve. Obviously, sometimes you just
need to readjust the curve. All we can maybe just
increase the strength if the particles shoot
away from the curve. So maybe let's make this -60, and maybe let's make this 0.9. So it's a little bit
closer to the curve. They can see now it's
following that curve nicely. Freaking out here a little bit. But maybe because
this corner is quite sharp and we're moving
at a fast speed. So I'm just going to
make this corner a little bit less sharp. And let's run that again. Vacancy that's
looking pretty cool. Alright, so that's
how easily is to have your particles follow
a specific Curve, play around with us, and play around with a
strength and the flow and see what things you can
create and what shapes you can create
with your curves. And just get familiar with
how to use this system. And then go ahead and
save your project. And I will see you
in the next lesson.
5. Lesson 04: Using Collision Objects To Create Dynamic Simulations: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson,
we're going to look at collision objects
and now you can add objects that will actually collide with your particles. So first of all, let's
delete everything in our scene by pressing
ax and click Delete. And First we need a
Particle Emitter. So let's press Shift a mesh. And this time we're
going to create a simple plane as our Emitter. Now, let's move it to
the side by pressing G X and just slide
it on the x-axis. And now we want to move
it up slightly GZ and then our Y to rotate
it on the y-axis. So let's maybe angled at
some angle like that. Now we can also
check which side is the normal side of
this one-sided plane. Now an easy way to do that, just click on this
drop-down here at the top and click this
face orientation. And this will show you the
front and back of your plane. Now we know the
particles will be emitted from the blue side, which is the normal or the
front side of this plane. So let's just toggle
that off again. Now we can add our Particles
System to our plane. So click Particles
and then click that a Laplace to add
our Particle Simulation. What I wanna do is I want
to increase the lifetime 250 just so that they don't disappear during
the simulation. And then let's go to
velocity and just increase the normal
velocity to, let's say ten. Let's see how that looks. Alright, so now you can
see we have our stream of particles being emitted
from this plane. And now we can add
an object that will be our Collision Objects. Let's create a cube by
pressing Shift a mesh cube. And let's move it up
by pressing G and Z. Let's just move it
up to about here. And let's scale it maybe on
the X, all its skeleton, the y-axis suppress SY and just pull that out of it until you have something
that looks like that. Now if you hit space, you can see that the particles
are simply going through this object because we haven't set this up as a
Collision Objects. So with this object selected, go to the Physics tab here on the right-hand
side and simply click this Collision button right here to make this a
Collision Objects. Now if we play this back, you'll see our Particles will bounce off from this object. Alright, so they are quite a few settings that we can change here and the Collision
and particle. So we only want to look
at these settings. We're not going to worry
about the soft body and the cloth settings, just a Particles settings. So first of all, you've
got this permeability. And that basically means
if it's set to zero, all the particles will be
colliding with this object. If we set this to one, all the particles will
go through our object. If we set this somewhere
in the middle, like 0.5, then there's like 50
per cent chance that the particles will either
go through or bounce off. As you can see, if we look
at this in wireframe mode, you can see some
particles are going through and others
are bouncing off. Alright, let's set that back to zero and X we have
the stickiness. If we increase this
to say ten are Particles will stick
to this object, can see that kind
of sticking the, they're not bouncing off, but they still flying off
once they get to the bottom. Let's bring that down again. And next we have
killed Particles. This means any Particle touching this object will be
killed instantly. Now remember this,
that option to actually see the dead particles. So we can click on our plane, go to the Particle settings, and then we can go to render extras and tick debt to
show those dead particles. If we play back again, now you can see those
particles are being killed as they get in
contact with this object. And now we can
actually see them. So that's maybe
something that is usable for specific things. But for now, let's just untick this so we don't see
those dead Particles. Alright, let's select
our collision object again and go back
to the Physics tab. So let's untick
killed Particles. And then we also have
damping and friction, which is also very important. So if we increase the damping amount and maybe
the friction a bit as well. And we play this back then
you can see we've got some friction as
they falling down. So if we increase that
fixed friction even more, you can see they kinda
dropping down really slowly. We can also randomize
these settings by just increasing the
randomized parameter a. Now you can see some of
them are bouncing off, some are seeking someone,
like falling down. Just add some nice random
variation to that. So you can go ahead and play
with these settings and see how they affect your Collision. And another thing that
we can do is we can also animate this object to just
add some interesting results. So maybe let's add a rotation. So this Objects spins like that. So make sure you're
on frame number one. And with our collision
objects selected, I'm going to press I on the
keyboard for insert keyframe. And then I'm going to
select rotation just to insert a rotation keyframe
on the first frame. And then we want to
go to the last frame, which is frame to 50. You can either just
scrub or you can use the shortcut Shift and right arrow on the keyboard
to jump to that last frame. Now I want to add
some rotation on the x-axis on this object. So press R and then X, and then just spend
your mouse around the object to add
a few rotations, maybe something like that. And then just click
and then press I and choose rotation again. That's going to insert another
keyframe on frame 250. So now if we go back to frame number one and we
play this back, you'll see that we get a
bit of a different result. So it's actually spinning
and it's kinda shooting the Particles in all the
different directions. Maybe let's just scale
this object down so S and Z to make it a bit more flat
and maybe a little bit more. Let's see what that does. So you can see that's
looking pretty cool. Now, we can also
duplicate this object, so let's duplicate it. And then with that
second objects selected, I'm gonna go to the Object tab. And then I'm going to introduce some delta transformations. So let's rotate it on the X. So maybe something like that. Let's duplicate that one again. And maybe let's create one that's slightly
offset like that. So change those under the
Delta transformations. Now if we play this back, you'll see that we have quite a nice and
interesting result. So as you can see,
Collision Objects can add some really interesting effects to your particle simulations. So go ahead, add some
objects, add some keyframes, animate them and see how they affect your particle
simulations. Then once you're comfortable using these collision objects, go ahead and save your project. And then I will see you
in the next lesson.
6. Lesson 05: Using Forces with Particles Simulations: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're
going to look at how to add different forces to our scene that will interact with our particle simulation. So first of all, I've
got a blank new scene. Let's delete
everything by pressing X and clicking the
delete button. And let's start by creating
our Particle Emitter. So for this, I'm
going to press Shift a mesh and let's create
a simple plain Emitter. Let's move it along the
x-axis by pressing G, X and rotate around the
y-axis by pressing R and Y. So now we can add our Particles System to
this Emitter by clicking on the Particles tab
here on the side and clicking on the Plus button
to add that Particle System. Now let's increase
the lifetime 52-50. And then let's scroll down
to the velocity section. Let's increase the normal
velocity to 10 m/s. Let's see how that looks. So now I can see the
particles are being emitted from our plane object. So let's see how we can add different forces to the scene. So let's add our first
force by pressing Shift a. And then you can go down
all the way to force-field. And this is where you will
find all the different forces, like force, wind, vortex,
magnetic, etcetera. Now, I'm not gonna go
through all of these forces. You can experiment
and see what they do. But let's look at
a couple of them. So the first one is
just called false. If I click on that, that's
going to create this falls in the center and I
can move it around, but let's leave it in the
center of the world for now. And then if you click on
the physics properties tab here on the side, we can see the parameters
of this force. So currently if we
play this back, you'll see nothing
really changed. And that's because
we need to increase the strength of this force. So let's increase
the strength to about maybe 15 and
see what that does. Now you can see the force
is actually pushing our particles away
from this force. And that's because we Using a positive number right
here for the strength. So let's make this
a negative value of -15 and let's see how that
affects the simulation. Now you can see the
force is actually pulling on these particles. They can see that
actually coming back towards that force. What we can also do
is we can increase the flow amount and that
will just make that those particles will flow directly from our
Emitter to the force. So maybe let's give
it a flow of two. Let's see how that works. And you can see that's
looking pretty cool. We can even move this
around and real-time and see how that changes
our simulation. So just select the force and press G on the keyboard
to move it around. We can also introduce some noise by just applying
this number right here. And that will just
add a little bit of noise to this force. Another thing that we
can do is we can use a falloff for this
specific force. So I'm just going to
move it a little bit further away from the Emitter. And then you're at
the bottom where we have the fall of settings. We have a minimum distance
and also a maximum distance. So if I enable the
maximum distance, but I just pull this out, you can see it's going to create this outline in the viewport. So we can see the maximum
distance of that force. So that means the particles
will only be effected once they enter this severe
around our force. So let's just set the
noise back to zero and it said the flow back
to zero as well. Let's set the strength to
maybe something like -50. Let's see what that does. So as you can see, our
particles are being emitted and as they enter this severe, they actually getting
pulled by less force. So that's just an interesting
way to control the way how this force is actually
affecting your Particles. Alright, so let's delete this force. Let's
create a new one. Let's go to the first frame. Press Shift a go-to force-field, and let's see the wind force. So as you can see,
it's going to create this little icon in the
center of the world. And now if we'd play,
we'll see that. And you can see we don't have a lot happening right there. So if we select our wind force and go to
the physics properties, we can increase the
strength of mountain. You can actually
see the strength of our wind in the viewport. Now if I play this back, you will see that our particles are being affected by this wind. So we can also add some
noise to that wind, and that will just add some
noise to the strength. Now, you can also rotate
this around if you want the wind to be in
a specific direction. So as you can see, I
can adjust this while actually playing
back the simulation, which is pretty cool. You can obviously also animate
any of these perimeters. Anything with a
little dot next to it can be animated or key-frames. So just keep that in mind. So before we delete this wind, just something to
note is that you can actually change the type of force right here
under the Physics tab. So right at the top
where it says that type of force, which is wind, you can go in here and
you can change it from when To force to
anything really. But I usually prefer to delete
it because there are no, the settings will be
reset back to default. So let's delete this force and let's see what else we have. Let's press Shift a force-field. And this time let's
look at the vortex so that you can see there
is our vortex false. And if we press Play,
Let's just reset. Sometimes it doesn't reset the settings from
the previous force. And all you have
to do is go into your particle simulations and just change any of
these settings. Maybe change the
number down to triple nine and then just
increase it by one again to get back to 1,000. And that will just
reset the simulation. Now if we press Space, you can see that
nothing really happens. So let's click on our
force and go to physics. And let's increase the
strength to around T. Alright, something is happening that's a little
bit too strongly. It's decreased to about ten. Now you can see our
particles are definitely being affected by this force. Let's bring this
down to maybe two. And you can see our
Particles of spiraling down. And then you can also
set the inflow to either a negative number to have the Particles
kinda move outwards. Or if you set this
to a positive value that will try and pull
those Particles inwards. So let's just set
this to maybe to. You can see they're kind of go inwards if we look at
them from the top. And if we set this
to negative two, then it will fly outwards. They can see our particles
are going outwards. Okay, let's look at one
more force that we can use. So let's go ahead and
delete this one and add a new force,
shift, a force-field. And this time let's look
at the turbulence force. Quite a popular forced to
use if you want to create some randomness in your
particle simulations. So let's see what that does. First of all, let's just
reset our simulation or Particles just by
changing a value. I can see we don't really
have anything happening. If we click on our
force go-to physics. Now we can change the strength. So let's increase the strength
and see what's happening. And immediately you can see something is happening
to a Particles. It's just adding a little bit of a random variation to the
velocity and movements. So let's increase this to about 40 and see what that does. Yeah, Now you can see it's
really all over the place. And that is how
turbulence works. You can also increase the
size of the turbulence. If you want bigger or
smaller turbulent movements, you can adjust that here, same as the flow. Let's increase the flow
and see what that does. Then everything kind of
just sticks together. So I'm going to bring
that down again. And if we increase the
size of the turbulence, then you'll see you'll
get a bigger movement for those Particles. Alright, so let's
bring that down. And we can also
introduce more noise at, we'll just add some more noise. And obviously we can
now go ahead and maybe disable the gravity. So if we go to our Emitter, go down to field weights and
disabled gravity altogether, then we get something
interesting way. They just shoot out
into space and we get some really nice turbulent
movement in those Particles. You can also combine
different forces together. So you can have a windfall, so you can have a vortex, you can have a turbulent force, and they can work together. Or you can keyframe
the strengths so that they come on at different
times in your animation. Play around with Forces, see what you can Create
and just experiment and see what they do. Play around where
they perimeters. And then go ahead once you are comfortable, save your project. And then I will see you
in the next lesson.
7. Lesson 06: Create Realistic Rain Using Particles: Hi and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going
to see how we can create a Rain Particle System to
use in any scene we like. So first of all, I've
created a new project. So let's delete everything
in our scene by pressing a and X and click
Delete to confirm that. And let's first
create our Emitter. So for the Rain Emitter, we're going to use
a simple plane. So just create a plane
by pressing Shift a mesh and then plane,
the plane selected. Let's scale it up
so it's pretty big. Now press N on your keyboard
to bring up this side menu. Make sure you're on the
item tab so we can see the size or the
dimension of our plane. I'm going to scale it up to about 30 m by 30
m on the X and Y. So you can just type it in here. And now we know we've
got a plane that's 30 m by 30 m. Alright, next we need to apply the scale. So with the plane selected, press Control a on the keyboard and then
just select scale. It's always good practice
to apply the scale because now if you look at
your side menu in pressing N, you can see that
the scale is set to one, which is correct. And it's always good when using physics or Particles
or any types of simulation to make sure that you apply the
scale of your Objects. Let's press N to hide
this side menu again. And now we have our
plane or our Emitter where our Rain particles
will come from. So let's move this plane
upsets above the grid. So with applying selected, press G and Z and
then just move it up. So it's kinda just
sitting above the plane. Now we need to ensure that the correct side of the
plane is facing downwards. Because remember, our
particles will not be emitted from the
top of the plane, but we want them to emit from
the bottom of the plane. Let's have a look at the
normals of this plane. So click the drop-down,
you're at the top, and then click on
face orientation. And now you can see our
plane is actually upside down because the rate pod is
the backside of this face. So we need to rotate this
around the plane selected, press R and X. And now we're going to
rotate it 180 degrees. So simply just type 180 on
the keyboard and press Enter. You can see the blue side
or the front side of this face is facing downwards,
and that's what we want. Alright, so click
this drop down again and just untick this
face orientation. Alright, so now we know that our Emitter is facing
the correct way. And with this plane selected, let's go to the particle
tab on the right-hand side, and let's create our
particle system. Let's rename this by double-clicking and
just typing the rain. You can call it anything. It's just kinda to keep
everything nice and neat. So now if we press Space, you'll see that we have
some particles coming from our Particle Emitter and they
cannot just falling down. And if we zoom in here
you can see we just Using these halo Particles. So for this particle simulation, we actually going
to use a collection of objects as our Particles. And because we're gonna do Rain, we're going to
create two or three different rain drop meshes. And then we're going to use
those as our Particles. So let's do that now. So let's create a new object
by pressing Shift a mesh, and we're gonna go
with an Ico SVM. Now, let's just move it to the side with the
ICA sphere selected. Press G, and just move
it on the x-axis. So it's kinda just away
from our simulation. Now let's zoom closer and
see what we can create. So with this oncosphere selected press Tab to go into edit mode. And now we're just going to
select this top vertices. So make sure you in
vertices select mode. So you've got these three
options at the top, vertices, age and phase, or you can just
use 12.3 on the keyboard. So press one to go into
vertex select mode and select this top vertex
of the ecosphere. Next we're going to enable
proportional editing. So this is this little
circle yet the top. You can either click
it or you can use the shortcut 0 on the keyboard. So switch that on. And then with that
one vertex selected, press G and Z to move it up. And then use the scroll
wheel or page up and page down on your keyboard to adjust
the proportional editing. We want something that
looks like a raindrop, so maybe something like this. Let's go into wire-frame
and maybe select some of these middle vertices by just
dragging a box around them. And then you can move
them up and down and just shape your rain drop. Maybe something like that
as good for our first drop. Now let's duplicate this
rain drop by pressing Shift D and then press X
to move around the x-axis. Now, let's change the look of the second rain drop
by pressing Tab to go into edit mode and maybe just move some of these
vertices around. So I'm just going to
bring these down. So we've got a little bit of a different shape and maybe
just select all of these. It's maybe scale that
down a note that I'm still using proportional
editing for this. So I'm just going to
just move this down and maybe you can either
just freely move it if you want to create
some shapes that's not perfectly just
perfectly symmetrical. Maybe that's something,
maybe something like that. Let's duplicate this one by
pressing Shift D and then x2, move it on the x-axis. And maybe just scale this
one down completely. And let's go into edit
mode by pressing Tab. And then again,
just move some of these vertices around
to change the shape. Maybe you gonna do
some rotation as well by pressing R. So we can just kinda rotate and
skew them a bit. Maybe. Something like that. You just want a
few or a couple of different raindrops shapes just to ensure that they're
not all exactly the same. So now let's select all of
these and right-click and select Shade Smooth so that
they look nice and smooth. As you can see,
some of these edges are still a little jagged. So let's add a
subdivision surface to all of these models. So click on the first one, go to your modifiers, this little range or
Spanish on the side. And then click add modifier, subdivision surface, and maybe add two levels for
the viewports. Now you can see it's a
little bit more smooth. Let's do the same
for the other two. So let's add a
subdivision surface up that view port level to two and do the same
to the third one. Alright, so now that we
have our three raindrops, Let's put them all
into one collection. Because we're going to
use more than one object. We need to place them inside
a collection so that we can reference the collection
as our particle object. So select all three Rain Drops, then press M on the keyboard. And now we're going to
create a new collection, such as click the New
Collection button, and let's call this
Rain Particles. And then click Okay. Now in the outliner, you can see that we have this new collection
called Rain Particles. And then we have these
three Ico spheres under that collection. You can rename these
measures, but for now, let's just minimize this
collection in the outliner. You can also switch this
collection of by clicking this little tick box and
then we don't see them, but we can still reference them. Alright, so let's select
our Particle Emitter again, and let's go to the Particles
settings for emission. Let's leave this as
default for now. Well, let's maybe just
change the lifetime to 250 because we don't want our
Particles to disappear for now. We probably going to
change that again once we've set up our camera. So for now, let's just
leave it at 1,000. Start frame is one, and in frameless maybe to 50, so that we have
something all the way through our Animation. And so if we play this back, you'll see that our
particles are falling. And yeah, let's go back
to the first frame. And let's change our Particles
to our new raindrops. So let's minimize emission
and it's go down to render. And render as we're going to
use a collection this time, not an object because
we're going to use that collection with
a three rain drops. So let's select collection
from this drop-down. And now it says
instance collection. You can simply click here. And then we're going to select the Rain Particles collection. Now if we play this back, you'll see that it's actually Using our rain drops as the
particles, as you can see. Now we can obviously
scale them up. So let's just scale
them quite big for now. We're obviously going to make them smaller, but for now just, let's just scale them up a bit so we can see
them a little easier. Next also increase the
scale of randomness just to add some random
scale variation. And I can see our rain drops are falling from the emitter. Let's go back to frame one, and let's go back to
the emission section. Let's increase the number two, maybe 5,000 for now. And let's see what else
we can change here. So let's go to velocity. And here we can increase the
speed of our rain drops. If they falling too slowly, you can increase this
normal speed to maybe five, and that will just increase
the speed going down. Let's maybe try something 20. And I can see it's
falling down quite fast. So maybe something like 15. All depends on what you need. Alright, now it'd be a good time to set up our camera view. So let's create a camera in the scene by pressing Shift a. And then we're going to select
camera from the drop-down. Now you can see it
created this camera in the middle of the scene. So let's move that camera
away from the middle by pressing G and then Y to
move around the y-axis. So just move it away,
maybe less four. And then we're also
going to move it up. So press G and Z just
to move it up slightly. Now I can see our
camera is angled incorrectly at scanner
looking towards that area. So let's press N on the keyboard with
our camera selected. And let's go to the item
tab here on the side. So here we can just
reset the rotation. So I'm going to set
the X to 90 degrees And then I'm also going
to set the Y to zero. And then we can also
set the Z to zero. So now you can see
our camera is aligned perfectly with our
scene or without grid. Now we can look
through the camera by clicking this camera icon. And let's play this back
and see what we have. Let's change the lens
on this camera by going to this camera Data
tab here on the side. And let's change the focal
length to something like 24. So it's just a wider lens. You can see, we see
a little bit more. Maybe that's too much. Let's
change it maybe to 35. Yeah, something like
that looks better. So if we play this back again, you can see our
raindrops falling down. If we go out of the camera, you can see that we've got all these particles here at
the bottom that we won't see. So maybe we can hide them. So let's go back and click on
our Particle Emitter again. Now we're going to go to
the Particles Settings again and into the
emission section. So we want to adjust
the lifetime. So we only have particles
falling down until they are kinda out of the way or
another view of this camera. So an easy way to do
that is just to look through the camera and
its space from frame one. And I'm going to pause
it wants the rain drops are kinda just below the camera view,
something like this. You can see we own frame 38, and that gave it enough time
for those particles to fall from the Emitter to just
add a frame of our camera. So we know it takes
about 38 or let's say 40 frames for that one drop, that one particle to move
from the top two out of view. We can change the lifetime of our Particles to
around this number, but let's maybe increase
it to you about 50. And then let's set the
lifetime of a Particles to 50. We don't really have to introduce
some randomness because they just going to disappear and we're not going to
see them disappear. Now if we go back to frame
number one and we press Space, you can see that our Particles will disappear
when it gets here. If we look through the camera, you can now see we have our raindrops and we don't
see them disappearing. Alright, next I want to add a slight angle to our rain drops so they're
not falling down, just straight down like this. So let's click on our Emitter. Let's go to a
Particles settings. And this time we're going to
go to the velocity section. And here we want to just change the direction of our velocity. So maybe let's add some
velocity on the X axis. So maybe about 3 m/s. Now if you play it back,
you can see our Rain is starting to move in
that x-direction. One thing to note, you can see our Particles or not angled. They are still angled
straight down. So let's fix that. There are a couple of
ways that you can do it, but I find the
easiest way is if we go to the render section and we enable this object
rotation right here. And then we go
back and we enable our Rain Particles
collection right here in the outliner by clicking this little box so
we can see them. And now if we rotate
these Particles, you can actually see them and rotating right here at the top. So if I select all these three and I press
R on the keyboard, you can see they all
kinda rotating like that. Now I want to rotate them, but I want to rotate
them individually. You can see they kinda
rotating now as a group. So we can change this by clicking this little
icon here at the top, the transform pivot point. And let's change it from median point to
individual origins. Now, you can rotate them
individually like that. So we want to rotate
them around the y-axis. So press R, Y and then just rotate them so they
slightly on an angle. Now if we play this back from frame one and we
look to the camera, you can see that our raindrops
are now at an angle. Maybe that's a little bit much. So let's just go back to our raindrop measures and it just rotate them
back slightly. Maybe just something like that. Let's look through the camera and playback from frame one. Yeah, that's starting
to look pretty cool. Obviously we still
going to change the size because they massive. But yeah, this is
just so that we can easily see what our
particles are doing. Alright, So in the
outliner we can hide this Rain Particles collection again by just clicking this
little box next to it. And next we can add some forces. Maybe we can add a wind
and also some turbulence. So let's start with a wind
force on the keyboard, press Shift a, and then we're
going to go to force-field. And let's add a wind. Let's move the wind
to the side by pressing G X and just
pulling it this way. And then we're going
to rotate it on the Y. So press R and Y and
then just rotate it. You can either rotate
it exactly 90 degrees Oh, maybe just add
an angle like that. Let's move it up
slightly by pressing G, just so that it's kinda in
the middle of our simulation. Now if we play
this back, nothing really will happen because the strength of this
wind is not very high. So let's select this force, go to physics, and let's increase the strength
to maybe around ten. Let's see what that does. Now you can see our window is definitely
affecting our rain. It's pretty strong.
You can see it moving. Let's decrease it
maybe to around six. Let's also introduce some
noise to that strength. So just set the noise
amount to maybe ten. And let's see how that works. I can see it's not all moving at exactly the same
velocity sideways. So that's just the noise introducing that we
introduced here. So maybe let's bring
the string down even more to maybe four. And let's see how that fields. We looked at the camera. Yeah, I think that
looks pretty cool. Now let's add in some
turbulence as well. So I'm going to
create a new force by pressing Shift a force-field. And this time we're going
to choose Turbulence. So it created this
turbulence force right there in the center and we can increase
the strength. Let's try something crazy like
20 and see what that does. So what we can do is we can click on our Particle Emitter, go to the Particles settings, and then we're going to
expand filled weights. So you, we can set the
influence of all these forces. So I'm going to bring
down the wind to zero so that we only see what
the turbulence is doing. So now if I press space again, we can see that the wind is not affecting
our simulation now, but the turbulence
force is affecting. So maybe let's just go back to our turbulence and increases to 50 just to see that something
is definitely happening. Yeah, you can see there's
definitely some turbulence. If I increase this to maybe you can do this
while it's playing actually. By increase it to
maybe like 150. You can definitely see
some turbulence in there. So that's obviously
a little bit strong. So maybe let's bring
it down to about 40. Let's also increase
the noise amounts, so it's not exactly the same. Yeah, I think that
looks pretty cool. Now let's bring in
our wind again. So on our Emitter, go to field weights and then just up this
wind value to one, just to ensure that that is
affecting the simulation. Let's look through the camera and press Space to preview it. Alright, I think
the turbulence is still a little bit too much. So I'm gonna go and
click on the turbulence, go to physics, and let's
bring this down to maybe 20. You can also
increase the size or decrease the size
of the turbulence. You can play with
this value and see how that affects the Particles. Let's have a look. Maybe I want to increase the
speed of our rain slightly. So let's select our Emitter, go to the Particles settings, and then we're gonna go
to velocity and just increase this normal
value to maybe 25. Can see now it's coming
down nice and fast. Alright, so next,
before we change the size and the
amount of particles, let's create our material
for the rain drops. So I'm going to enable this collection in
the outline again, the Rain Particles,
and let's just have a look at those raindrops. So if we just zoom in here and let's give them a material. So go ahead and save
your project now. And let's go to the shading
tab right here at the top. Now let's select the
first rain drop and click New to create
a new material. And let's just give it a name. Let's just click there
and call it rain drop. Alright, so currently
we are viewing this in the material preview
renderer, which is fine. We will probably do our
final render for this, either you can either
use EV or cycles, depends on exactly
what you want. We'll probably do a render Using cycles just because
it's more Realistic. And the reflections and the
translucency and all of that, we'll just look a lot better. But for now we can just
preview it in this material, preview render on this material
which is zooming here, we can delete this
principled BSD if node. So just select this node, press X to delete it. And let's create a new
node by pressing Shift a and then click on
the search field. Now, let's type gloss. And we're going to choose
this gloss be SDF. Just place it there and connect this green dot to the surface. And I can see our raindrop is looking like something like gloss, which
is pretty cool. You can also give
it a slight color. So if we click on this
color right here, you can either maybe
just a slight, slight blue, something like
that, maybe very subtle. And yeah, that's
looking pretty cool. And then you can also
adjust the roughness. If it's on zero,
it's super shiny. If it's on one, it's very
met or not shiny at all. And anything in-between, you can kinda just adjust it
and see what you like. So maybe something like
something like that, not to glossy and
not to met looking. So now let's apply this material to these raindrops as well. So simply click on
the second one. Click this little
drop-down here, and choose that material that
we created called raindrop. Let's do the same with this one. They're all using this
same material basically. Alright, so let's
go back to Layout, and now we can hide
this collection again. And let's look
through our camera. Let's play this from frame one, and let's just run
it for a few frames and pause it right there. Now we can change over to
either material preview, this little icon right
here at the top. And then you can see
the rain drops in the material preview render. But we want to render
this Using cycles. So we're gonna go
to our render tab and change our render
engine two cycles, and then choose your
device if you have a GPU. Next, I'm going
to change over to the rendered view
right here at the top. And I can see it's rendering
and it's looking very blue, so we'll probably have
to adjust that material. Let's just go to
our world settings. So we can now use
either a background, like just a black color. So if we bring this down, we can just see a black
color or we can bring in an HDRI so that we have realistic
reflections and lighting. So let's do that now. Click this little
dot next to color, and then we're going to
choose environment, texture. You'll see everything
will turn pink because we don't have an HDRI selected yet. So click on Open and then
browse to your favorite HDRI. You can either use the HDR
either I provide or you can download any HDRI
that you want to use. Alright, so now you
can see we've got our HDRI in the scene. Let's just hide it
from the viewport. So if we go to our render tab, go down all the way to foam expanded form and then just tick this box next
to transparent. So now you can see we
don't see the HDRI, but it's still affecting the lighting and the
reflections in a scene. Next, we want to go back to
our Particles settings and we want to hide the Emitter
when doing the final render. So let's go down to render. And then we simply
antique show Emitter. And we can do the same
for the viewport. So under view-port display, also antique Show Emitter. Now if we play this back, we don't see the
emitted the top. And if we do a quick
little render by clicking render
and render image, you'll see that we don't see that background Or we don't
see that imitate the top. And we also don't see the
HDRI, which is great. Alright, so I think
we're ready to change the size just
to make it smaller because these raindrops
are massive and then also increase the
amount of particles. So let's select our Emitter, go to a Particles settings, and then it's CO2 emission first to increase the
amount of raindrops. So currently this
is set to 5,000. Let's increase this
to maybe 25,000. Alright, go back to the first frame and let's
adjust the size as well. So open the render section, and this is where we're
going to change the size. So let's just play
it for a few frames so that we have a
reference in the viewport. And now we can simply just
drag this number smaller. Now you can decide how big
your rain drops should be. I think that is maybe
looking pretty cool. Obviously some of them
are quite pretty large, but maybe they close
to the camera. But something that
we will enable these Motion Blur
and that will just make everything
look a lot better, especially these
fast-moving raindrops. So I'm gonna go with
something like maybe 0.05. And I think that
looks pretty cool. And let's maybe do a quick
little test renders. I'm just going to run it
through a couple of frames. And then I'm also going
to enable motion blur. So I'm gonna go to my
render tab here at the top. And then you'll see
there's a motion blur box that you can check. So under the Render
Settings, under sampling, I'm just going to bring down the render samples by default, it's set really high to 4,096. Let's bring this down to
maybe 256 samples for now, and you can enable denoising. Alright, and I think
everything is fine. Let's go down to
color management as well and change the V transform to standard just to get a little bit more
contrast in the shot. Alright, so now we can click on Render and render image
right there at the top. Or you can use the shortcut F2, and that's just going to
render a still image. So we can have a look
at our motion blur. Once their renders done, we can click this little
drop-down here at the top in the corner and just
change this to color so we don't see
the transparency. You can see this is
looking pretty cool. You can see our rain drops. You can see some
nice motion blur. Obviously some of these
raindrops are still pretty large Another thing that we can
introduce is depth of field. So some of the raindrops closer to camera will
be out-of-focus, and some of the
raindrops further away will be in-focus, etcetera. So let's do that now. Select the camera
in the outliner. Click on the little camera
icon here on the side. And this is where we're going
to enable depth of field. So you can simply just click on depth of field right here. And now we need to set
our focus distance. I like to use the limits
to see where my focus is. So expand this viewport display and then check this box limits. Now if you go out of the camera and kinda look
at this from the side, I'm just going to change
back to Solid View. If you look at this
from the side, you can see there's a little
cross here in the center. And this is our focus distance, where the camera is
actually focusing. Maybe if we look at
this from the side, you can see these are
the Rain Particles and our cameras kinda
just outside of the rain. So I'm going to take
the camera and move it forward by pressing G Y. So we're moving on the y-axis and can I just move
it so that our camera is inside or underneath
that Rain system. Alright, and now
under depth of field, we can adjust this
focus distance. And as I'm adjusting this, you can see this focus limit
moving in the viewport. So maybe let's set
it to somewhere in the center of this
particle simulations. So it's kinda focusing
on that area. And now let's look
through the camera again, go back to our rendered view. And now we can just have a
look at the depth of field. So what we can do is we can
use this f-stop number to increase the effect
of the depth of field or make it less obvious. So the smaller this number, the shallower the depth
of field will be, an more visible the
depth of field will be, Or the bigger that blur will be. So let's bring
this down to maybe 1.4 and see what we get. And everything is still
looking in focus. Maybe let's bring this
down to like if you see, if I set it to 0.1, you can see most of the
raindrops or autofocus. And some of them
are kinda in-focus, so maybe not too
low, maybe like 0.8. Let's do a quick render to
see how that looks like. So press render, render image, and let's just give it
a moment to render. And let's just change this to color so we can see
it a bit better. And I can see we have a little bit of a
better looking result. Some of the you can see there's a nice big rain
drop you in front that's autofocus,
which is quite nice. And maybe we can
increase the depth of field effect a little bit more. Let's go back and let's bring this f-stop number
down to maybe 0.4. And let's do a quick render
again and see how that looks. Alright, so I think that
is looking pretty cool and I think we are ready to cash our simulation so that we can render it out and use
it in our projects. So first of all, we
need to cache it. So we're going to
select our Emitter. And then we're gonna go to the Particles settings, go cash. And now we're going to
simply click on bake. Now we'll see the plate will
just quickly run through. Now I'd say Z or 250
frames in memory. And now we know that our
Simulation is cached. So I can scrub
through this freely. I can move around and
I don't have to worry about simulating it
every time I run it. So I can start to play
it anywhere and I can just play back
my simulation. Alright, so let's save our
project now and you can now render your Rain Particles. So let's quickly look
at the render settings. First of all, we
have our samples, so we can increase
this max samples maybe to something like 512th just to get a little bit more
samples and less noise. And now we can go to the Output tab here on
the right-hand side. This is where you
set your resolution. So we simply going to
render an HD version of this 1920 by 10 at. And then we can go down, we can set our frame rate
here by default is a city 24. And then we've got
our frame range. So we're gonna render
from frame one to 250. And this is where you can
set your output where you want to render that file. And you can also choose what format you
want to render as. Render as individual PNG
images or maybe open EX. Or you can just simply render a video file I can MOV or MP4. So I think the best for this
will be if we just render either an E XOR or a PNG so that we have
that transparency. And then you can overlay it onto a video or Using compositing. So I'm going to choose PNG and then make sure
that you use RGBA, which will include
the alpha channel, the transparency, and not
just a black background. You can also choose
if you want to render it eight or 16 depth. So let's choose 16 for a little
bit of a better quality. Now we can set our output folder by clicking on this
folder icon here. Now let's create a new folder somewhere where you want to
render your project too. So I'm just gonna
call this one Rain. And let's go into that folder and I can
give you a files, a name. Remember this is going to render one PNG for every
frame, 250 frames. So I'm gonna call this Rain. And then I'm just going
to place an underscore. Because after the underscore, it's going to have
the frame number like 010203, etcetera. So just adding that little
underscore makes it easier to just use that when you're doing
your compositing. Click on Accept, and
let's do one final save. Now you can start your render by clicking render and
render Animation. Now this will run through all the frames at can take
some time and depend, depends on the speed
of your GPU, etcetera. So just let this run through. And once it's, once it's done, you can combine all
those image sequences together in your compositor. And then we will have a nice
Rain render that you can overlay over footage, etcetera. So let us run through,
save your project. And I will see you
in the next lesson.
8. Lesson 07: Cinematic Floating Dust Particles: Hi and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going
to look at how to create cinematic dust particles Using the Blender Particle System. So first of all, let's delete
everything in the scene by pressing X and
clicking Delete. So let's create a big cube and then use that
as the Emitter. So press Shift a
mesh and then cube. And then we're going to
scale this up quite vague. Or press N on the keyboard
to bring up the side menu. Let's set the
dimensions here to 3 m by 3 m by 2 m in height. So that's kinda the
size that we need our Particles to love in. So let's just look at this
from the side and move it up by pressing G and Z. And can I just moving it
on top of our grid or the floor so we can press Enter again to
hide this side menu. And now with this
object selected, let's go to the
Particles settings. Let's also rename this cube by double-clicking
in the outliner. And let's just call
this our Dust Emitter. Alright, so let's create
our new Particles System, and let's just call this Dust. Now, let's quickly go through
some of these parameters. So let's increase the number of particles to around 10,000. For now, we will probably
increase that once we get to a later
stage in this lesson. And then we also want
them to be released at the same time or
emitted at the same time. So let's set the
end frame to one, and then let's increase
the lifetime to 250 because we don't
want them to disappear. And then we want to change
the source instead of faces. We want to change
that to volume. So it's kinda inside our cube. Now we don't want to
see our actual Emitter. So let's go down
to render and also viewport and disable the show Emitter just so
that we don't see that in the final render and
also not in the viewport. So let's just bring down
the scale of our particles. If we go to Viewport Display
and we just bring them down, you will obviously
change this to a different particle
from this halo. But for now let's just bring
it down so we can just see our amount of particles. Obviously, if we play this
now they will just fall to the floor because we
have gravity enable, so we can disable
that now as well. If we go down to fill weights, let's just bring down the
gravity all the way to zero. And now they should just
move out like that. Alright, let's go to the velocity section
and let's just bring this normal velocity
down to zero. So now our particles
won't have any velocity. So if you play this back,
they'll just stay in place. Now before we continue further with our Particles settings, Let's create our
actual Dust Particles that we will use
in the simulation. So instead of using one
object or one to create a couple of different
variations of Dust Particles. Put them all in one
collection and then use that collection as
our particle object. So let's do this now. Let's hide this Dust
Emitter and let's create a new object by
pressing Shift a mesh. And let's create an IPO sphere, which is open up this
menu right there at the bottom and bring the
subdivisions down to one. So it's just a very simple, we want to keep this Dust
objects as simple as possible. Obviously, we're going to
render quite a bit of them. So yeah, just try and
keep them low poly. So let's just move this out of the way by pressing G and X. And then we also want to
scale it down quite a bit. We can obviously
scale it down once we set the Particles scale. And then let's just go into
edit mode by pressing tab, select one of these vertices. And let's enable proportional
editing as well. And then you can just
kinda move them around. Use the mouse wheel
or page up and page down to adjust that influence. And just move these points
around until you have something just like a weird
little, little dust particle. So let's create a few of
these I'm just going to duplicate by
pressing Shift D and go into edit mode
and just change the shape a little bit around. Maybe this one can be
maybe more flat like that. Maybe even Something like that. Just create a few
different variations. You can also just
maybe scale them. Just watch out when
you scale them, you can see the pivot point is now Canada in a weird area. You can always just reset
that pivot by right-clicking and then go set
origin to geometry. And that just kinda set
it in the center again. So kinda just look at
the pivots and make sure they are set in the middle
or somewhere in the middle. What we can also do
is we can create like a little Hair maybe. So first of all, I'm
just going to set my 3D cursor here by holding
Shift and right-click. And then let's create a curve, shift a, and then curve,
and let's create a Bezier a Curve, just
something like that. Let's scale it down and just move it off to the side,
something like that. And now we can go into
edit mode and we can just move maybe
this point around. Press E to extrude just
three points, maybe. Just so we have a little
dust Hair particle as well. Now we also need to
give it some geometry. So with this Curve selected, go to the curves options you on the side or the Data
Properties tab. And now we're gonna
go to geometry and let's just see under bevel, just increase this depth. And then we get like little
little pipe like that. So that'll be our
Hair Particles. Maybe just make it I don't know, maybe something like that. We can maybe scale
the whole thing and make this a little
bit like that. And then we're just going
to duplicate this one, go into edit mode and just move some of these
points around. So maybe rotate that, maybe switch off
proportional editing and just move them around so we have something a little
bit different. Maybe. Something like that. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And it's scaled that down. Maybe let's set the pivot point. Right-click. Set
Origin geometry. Same with this one, just so that it rotates
around the center. And now we just need to
convert these to two measures, guarantee they stole curves. So you can just right-click
and then convert to Mesh. Same with this one,
right-click, convert to mesh. So now you can see they
are little measures. Cool. So I think we need
one more of these smaller or maybe two more
That's a little bit smaller. So let's just scale one down. Maybe just flatten it. Maybe something like
that and then maybe one more that's slightly bigger. Let's just scale it on the X
and Y by just pressing S and X or Y or Z just to
change the shape. Or you can just
go into edit mode and just pulled some of
these things around. I think that should be fine. So let's select all
of these objects, all our Dust objects, and let's move them into
their own collection by pressing M on the keyboard
and then new collection. And let us call this Dust. Alright, so now if you
look in the outliner, you can see we have
this dust collection with all these dust particles. So we can actually just
hide this whole collection. And let's bring
back our Emitter. And let's go back to Particles
settings, then render. And now we're going
to change this render as halo To Collection because we want to use
that dust collection and where it says
instance collection, just choose that collection
that we created. Cool. So now I can see we have all these little Dust Particles and that's looking pretty cool. Obviously, we're going to
tweak quite a bit stole. So let's have a look
here under scale. And it just increase
the scale or randomness all the way to one. So we get some nice
random scale values. And then let's go
to rotation and add some rotation to
these Dust Particles. So let's give this a
randomized value of one. And let's see if
that does anything. So you can see that actually
changed the rotation, but they're not going to animate or actually moving
that direction. So for that, we need to
enable this dynamic. And let's also give
it some spin if we expand this angular velocity, and let's give this
a value of 0.5. Now, if we play this back, nothing will happen
because I realized we haven't given it any
actual velocity. So let's just go back to
the velocity section. And now this normal velocity
With that we've set to zero. Let's set this to 0.01, just a tiny amount, 0.01. And let's see if that
works. There we go. As you can see, our
particles are moving slowly around and they
also slowly spinning, and that's exactly what we want. So we need to give
it some velocity for this rotation to actually work because it's Using the
velocity and then it, I think it's multiplying
it with this value, and that's our angular velocity. So cool, we've got
the rotation sorted. Alright, so I think
we are ready to add some forces to our scene. Let's add a turbulent force. So press Shift a and then we go to force-field and
it's added turbulent. And then under the physics
tablets give it some strength. And I think one is a
little bit too much. Let's bring this down
or let's just preview that at one and see what we get. Yeah, you can see that's
just moving crazy. You can see Particles
going all over the place So if we go back to our
turbulence properties, Let's set the strength
to 0.050, 0.05. Let's see how that works. Yeah, that's looking
pretty cool. You can see them moving in
all different directions. They do accelerate quite a bit. And there is an easy
way to fix that. If we go back to our Emitter, go back to our
Particles settings. And then under physics, if we expand forces, we can add some little
bit of damper idea. So let's maybe add 0.05 and
it see how that works at. We'll kinda just damp
down on the Forces. So let's add our camera first. So press Shift a and then camera and image is going to move
this with our camera. Oh, as you can see, it
created our camera. They were replaced the 3D cursor with the cameras selected press Shift S and then select
cursor to world origin. And then press Shift S again, and then choose
selection to cursor. And that's just going
to snap our camera to the world origin and then press Gy to just move
the camera on the y-axis, then press N to bring up
this side menu under item. Then we're just going to reset the rotation by setting X to 90 degrees and then Y to
zero and Z to zero as well. Then our cameras just kinda
aligned with our grid. Now we can maybe move it
up slightly by pressing G Z and then GY to
move it forward. Okay, now we can press N to hide the side menu and press zero to just go into
that camera view. You can see we've
got our Particles and are floating around. So now let's save this. Let's go to our Dust Emitter, go to the Particles settings, and now we're going to
decrease the size quite a bit. So let's go to the
render section. Let's bring down
the scale to 0.015. So now you can see we've got
these tiny Dust Particles, but I think we need to
add more particles. So now we're gonna go up
all the way to emission. And let's increase this
10,000 to 100,000. And let's see what we get. So yeah, that's quite intense. But what we're going to do is let's go back to our
camera settings. So click on the camera
and the outliner, go to the camera icon here. And let's set the focal
length to something like 85, so it's kinda more zoomed in. And then we're going to
enable depth of field. And now we just need to
set our focus distance. So let's go to, so let's go to Viewport
Display and just enable limits so we can
see where the focus is. And then we just need
to look at this from the side, something like that. I think we need to move our
camera back slightly now. And then we can move our
focus distance back to maybe somewhere in the center of
this Particle Simulation. Alright, Something like that. And then we can
decrease our f-stop. Let's make it maybe 1.4. And then we're also
like to do is increase the blades two or set the
blades to around eight. And then you get that nice bokeh with an eight-sided the octa, I think you call it
like an octagon, eight-sided Bokeh,
which is pretty nice. Let's save this
quickly and let's have a quick preview and see if we can just get a glimpse
of how that's going to look, we still need to
add some materials to our Dust Particles. But let's go to our
render settings quick and change this to cycles GPU. If you are using a GPU, Let's go to a world
settings and just change this background color
to maybe just an HDRI. So I'm going to set this
to environment texture. Click Open, and I can browse
to your favorite HDRI. Let's do like an indoor one. And now I'm just going to
hide it from the background. So I'm gonna go to the
Render Settings and go down to form, click Transparent. And you can see this
quite a lot of particles. I think we need to bring
the size down quite a bit. It's always just a
matter of tweaking, tweaking, tweaking until you
get something that works. I think Let's do 005. Might be so small. This is see if we can preview
this in material preview. You can see them kind of
flickering in and out-of-focus, but they are looking
pretty nice. You can obviously
experiment with the size, and it all depends
on the size of the object to create it
in that dust collection. If you created them quite big, you will have to just
adjust the size. So let's quickly just set a material for these
Dust Particles. So let's open this collection and let's just go
to one of these Objects and just give
them some material. I'm going to save my project. And with this object selected, let's go to the shading tab. Click New to create a
new shader material. And let's give it a
name, just call it Dust. And I think the only
thing we need to change here is to set the transmission because we want our
Dust Particles to be transparent because they so small they, they
basically transparent. So maybe set this to about 0.7 transparency under
the transmission 0.7. That's the only thing
we need to set. We can keep the color white. You can maybe make
it a bit more gray if that works better
with your scene. And then we can also add
some fog into our scene and maybe just a spotlight to visualize our Dust a
little bit better. So let's do that now. Let's go into solid view. And then let's
create another cube. And this will be our
volumetric, our Fog basically. So let's scale that up. Let's just make it
slightly bigger than our Particle Emitter. And then you can simply
go to the shading tab, click on New, this
will be our fog. Let's just give this a name and then we can delete
this principle, BSD if shader by pressing X. And then we're going to
create a new note by pressing Shift a
click on Search. And this time we're just
going to type volume. And then we're going to use
the principled volume shader. And then you can
connect this node to the volume input of
the material output. And if this slows down
your system quite a bit, Let's just go to our
Particle Emitter and it just changes back
to 10,000 for now. Because obviously if we adding that volumetric and
all the particles that can slow down your
computer quite a bit. Alright, so let's see
how that looks like. If we look through it
and I can see our fog is way too dense and is just make sure that you don't
accidentally create an object inside this
dust collection. I think I just did that. And so you can accidentally
create a object inside there. In that object will be
used as a dust particle. So just make sure you drag it
outside of that collection. So let me just see if
we go to the material Tabia and expand volume just to bring down the
density of this fog. Let's make this 0.1, maybe even less 0.05. And I think that will
actually do the trick. We still need some, a spotlight, maybe bring down the
environment light. So if you go to
your world settings and the strength of this HDRI, let's bring it down to 0.1. And let's add a spotlight. So go back into solid view. And let's just add a light. Spotlight, smooth it up, and maybe move it to the side. May be up and then just
rotate it around the Y axes, maybe something like that. And let's increase the
strength to maybe 500. Let's preview that quickly
and see what we get. I just want to make
this beam a little bit more like that. Then maybe increases to 5,000. Yeah, that's what I want. And then maybe decrease
this even more. So we just get like a
beam of light like that. And then we can also increase the radius of the slide
and just make it, let's just make the radius 0.01, just a tiny radius so we get soft shadows
because obviously these Dust Particles
can actually cause shadows onto other
objects, etcetera. So you just want to
play with the size of the light source as well. And there you go. That's how easy it is to create these dust particles
inside of Blender. So here is a test
shot I did that. I included the Blender file with the Assets provided with this course that you can
download and have a look at. So simple as that, just a spotlight and one model and just an
interesting camera, move and add these
Dust Particles and it just makes your
shot looks so much better. So I hope you
enjoyed this lesson. Save your project now, and I will see you
in the next lesson.
9. Lesson 08: Debris Explosion Using Particle Simulations: Hi and welcome back. In this lesson, we're
going to create a Debris Explosion
Using Particles. So before we start, obviously you can create
a Debris Explosion by using something like
rigid body Simulations. And I would recommend
that you actually use a rigid body
simulation on some of the bigger parts of your debris. And then you can add the
particle simulations on top of that to create a more
complex Debris Explosion. But you can get pretty far
with just using particles. So let me show you. So we've started
with a new scene. Let's delete everything by pressing X and clicking Delete. And then let's start with
our Particle Emitter. And this time we're going
to use a simple plane. So press Shift a and
then mesh and in plane. And with the plane selected, press N to bring up this
side menu on the item tab. And let's set the dimensions
of this plane to 2.5 m by 2.5 m. Now we will see that
our scale has been changed. So we need to apply our scale. So with the plane
selected press Control a, and then click Scale to
just reset that to one. Now let's rename our plane to Emitter here in the outliner. And then let's rotate our plane. So it's kinda just tilting
at an angle because I want to have our Debris
explode this way. Alright, so let's just
maybe move it off to the side slightly by
pressing G and Y. So I'm just moving
around the y-axis, just slightly away from
the center of our scene. We can press N Now to
hide this side menu. Now, let's begin by setting
up our particle system. So the plane selected, let's go to Particles. And in this lesson we're
actually going to create two Particle systems
on this one Emitter. Let's start by creating our first Particle System
by clicking this plus, and let's call this
one large debris. Now, you're just below this, you'll see Particles
settings here and we can rename this as well, because we're going to
basically duplicate these settings later on to
create our smaller debris. So let's call this large. So we know this is the settings
for the larger debris. Now, let's have a look at
our emissions section. So let's leave the number
of particles to 1,000. And let's change the
end frame to three. That means it's going to
release or emit all 1,000 Particles from frame
one to frame three. And let's also increase
the lifetime to 250 as we don't want our
Particles to disappear. Now, let's go to the velocity section and
let's set all this to zero. And the reason that
we're not going to use a velocity is we're
going to use a force like an explosion
that will actually force our particles in
a certain direction. Now we can set up our rotation
in the meantime as well. So let's take a
rotation and it's changed the orientation
axes to normal. Let's randomize that
all the way so we get some nice random rotations. And then let's take
this dynamic as well. And that will just add some
dynamic rotation as well. Alright, let's
move this plane up slightly by pressing G and Z. So it's kinda just
sitting above the plane. Now, let's play this
back and see what happens. If I press Space. You'll see that
our Particles will simply just fall
from our Emitter. And that's because we don't have any velocity on these Particles. Now we're going
to fix that using a force that will act
like an explosion, that will actually explode our Particles This way forward. So let's do that now. So in the viewport, press Shift a and then go down to force-field and select force. And this will be our
exploding force. Now, we want the Particles
to explode this way. So I want to move this force. So it's sitting behind
this Particle Emitter. So it's forcing
the Particles this way with a force selected, press G and Y and just move
this force on the y-axis. So it's kinda just
sitting, you're behind our Emitter with this
force-field selected. Let's go to the Physics tab and let's increase the
strength to 500. Now we also want to
keyframe this strength, so it doesn't stay
at 500 all the time, but it's going to go at
will drop down to zero. So make sure you're
on the first frame. And then click this
little dot next to this 500 to create a
keyframe on frame one. And then go to frame four by using the arrow
keys on the keyboard. And now we're going to
bring this strength down all the way to zero and then just click this little box to create
a keyframe as well. So now you can see we have these two keyframes
on frame one and also unframed for and that will
just keyframe our force Let's save that now. Let's go back to frame one and press Space to preview that. Now you can see we have
this nice Explosion. Are Particles are exploding in the right direction and
everything is looking nice. Now let's add a
symbol floor that we can change into a collision objects just to see
how our particles are interacting with our scene. So I'm simply going
to create a plane, maybe something like that. And then we're also wanna do is as shown a stretch
it out slightly. So I'm going to press
S and just scale it on the x-axis, so it's an X. And then I also want
to extrude this wall. So we have a wall on this side that are Particles
can interact with that. So the plane selected press
Tab to go into edit mode, press two to go into edge selection mode and
select this one edge. And now we simply
going to press E to extrude and then Z to
lock around the z-axis. So let's pull it up
to about this height. Press Tab to go into
edit mode again. And let's apply the scale. So press Control a and
then select scale. Now, if we play this back, nothing will happen
because we need to set this object as a
Collision Objects. So with your plane or your
floor objects selected, go to the Physics tab and
then click on Collision. Alright, so now if
we play this back, you will see our
particles will interact, but they bouncing around
quite hectic early. So let's fix that by introducing some damping and also some friction on this
Collision plane. So let's set the
damping amount to 0.6 and let's set the
friction amount to 0.7. Now, you can go
ahead and play with these numbers and see
what results you get. And just play around until
you are happy with a way that your particles are bouncing around or interacting
with the environment. Alright, so now let's
move both our Emitter and the force just slightly
away from this as I want to create something
a bit more interesting. So are these two
objects selected, press G and why to just
move them on the y-axis. And let's select our plane, go into edit mode, press two for edge selection, and then select this front edge. Let's press E to
extrude that and then Z to lock it in that axes. And I want to create like a
door or an entryway so we can use that for our Debris
to shoot through. So let's press three on the keyboard and
select this face. Now press I for insert and just pull them out down until you get something like that. And now we're going to
scale this insight planes. So press S and then X two
scattered on the x-axis, and then press two to go
into edge select mode. Select this top edge. Let's just zoom
in here slightly. And let's bring this
edge down by pressing G and Z to lock
around the z-axis. And maybe let's do the
same with this bottom one. Just move it down slightly. And now we can simply
just delete this face. So make sure you on face
select mode or press three, select this middle phase, and then we can press X and select faces to
delete that phase. Now, let's press Tab to
go back to object mode, and let's see how this works. Save your project, make sure
on frame one, press Space. And let's see. As you can see, that's
looking pretty cool. Particles are coming through this doorway and you can see they kinda bouncing
away from the edges. And I think that
looks pretty cool. Okay, so now we are
ready to create our actual Debris Particles. So save your project
now and let's create our debris objects. So first one, let's
create a cube. So shift a mesh and cube. Then let's move this away
from our scene by pressing G and why to just move
it on the y-axis. Now, let's create a
few random debris. So I'm just gonna
go into edit mode, maybe into Vertex Selection. And can I just move
these things away? And obviously you don't want
them to be perfect because these are kinda Debris sections. So let's just find our
little Debris piece, maybe something just like little rectangle,
Something like that. It's quite tricky to
do this in this way. Yeah, I just kinda
something like that. Then what I will suggest is
reset your origin point. So right-click set
origin to geometry. And then we actually want
to move our objects. So the origin is kinda
at the bottom of this, this object because it will
actually use that midpoint or the origin to place
it on a surface. So if this origin is closer
to the bottom of the object, and we'll just look
a little better. And easy way to do that
is going to edit mode Press tab and then select
everything by pressing a, and then just move it up
so you can just press G and Z and kinda just move it so that that pivot is more
to the bottom of the object. You have to do this
inside of edit mode. So if I press tab now and if
I press R, you will see it. It's going to rotate
around that bottom point. So it doesn't show
you do that for all the little debris pieces. So now you can just move
it back to its position. And let's duplicate this
one by pressing Shift D. And let's just change
it a little bit around. So go into edit mode. And I'm simply just gonna kinda move these points may be around. So we have something
a little different. Maybe move this. We have something like that. And then I'm going to reset
the origin to geometry, go into edit mode, maybe look at this
from the side, and then we can just
select everything, move it up so that
pivot is kinda more at the bottom of
that piece of Debris. Alright, so let's duplicate
this one as well. Shift D, and maybe let's
just scale this one, scale on the y-axis. So S and NY and maybe sx2, bring it down maybe
a little bit. And yeah, that pivot
point is looking alright. So let's duplicate
this one again. Maybe let's rotate it on the Z, and then let's
scale it on the X. And what else can we do? Maybe let's take these four
points and scale them down. So it's maybe
something like that. Maybe scale it down as well, just to get some interesting
little Debris shapes. Now, let's reset the
origin to Geometry, going to edit mode, press a, and then
just move it up. Just so that pivot point is
kinda setting at the bottom. Alright, let's maybe
create one or two more. So let's duplicate this one. Maybe let's just scale
it in the Y axes and maybe in a Z to create
like a flat canopies. Maybe let's move
these two points, outer butt and then maybe back. Alright, let's set the
origin to geometry, go into edit mode, select everything, look at this from the side and
just move it up. Alright, let's maybe rotate some of them as
well so they're not all pointing in the
same direction. Alright, let's maybe
duplicate this one. And let's scale this one. Maybe in the, in the Z. Yeah, maybe something like that. He can maybe move some
of these points around. Maybe let's scale that in, maybe something
random like that. Alright, let's set our origin
liquid this from the side, go into edit mode, press a, and just move
everything up slightly. Okay, Another thing that we
wanna do is we want to apply the scale for all of
these Debris Objects. So select all of them, press Control a, and
then click Scale. And that will just ensure
that our scale is set to one. And that will just make
everything work better. Alright, So now we can add all of these into a collection. So select all of these
Debris, press M, New Collection and let's
call this Debris large. Alright, so now we
have this collection with our large debris pieces. Let's save our project and let's click on our Particle Emitter. And let's go to our
Particles settings. And then we're gonna go to the render settings
because we don't want to use these halos. We want to use a collection, and then we want to use our
Debris large collection. Another thing that we
want to take your ease, our object rotation and
that's just going to use that random rotation that
we gave it in the viewport. Alright, let's press Space
and see what we get. And as you can see, our
particles are super tiny, so we just need to increase
the size or the scale. So under the Render Settings, just increase the scale. And here you can just adjust the scale until you are happy. And then also
remember to increase the scale or randomness
all the way to one, just to add some nice
scale variation. That looks pretty cool. Alright, let's go back
to our first frame. Let's press Space and
see what we have. So yeah, that is
looking pretty cool. Alright, so let me show
you how easy these to create a little bit of a more
complex Particle System. So what we're gonna do is
we're going to duplicate this Debris large collection and create smaller debris that we're going to use
On that same Emitter. So easy way to do this
in your Outliner. Right-click on this
Debris large collection and then simply click on
Duplicate collection. And that's going to
create a duplicate of that collection with
all the objects inside. So let's rename this new
collection to Debris small. Alright, now let's select all of these objects
under Debris small, and it's just move them away so we can see them
because they currently sitting on top of these
other debris pieces. So let's press G and why
to just move them away. And now we're just going
to scale them down. So just press S and simply
just scale them down We can also change this pivot
or the Transform Pivot, yet the top two
individual origins. And then we can just
scale them like this. So scale them down
nice and small. And then we also want
to apply this scale. So with all of them selected, press Control a, and
then select scale. Alright, so now we have
our two collections, Debris large and Debris small. Okay, let's save our project. Let's go back to
the first frame. And now let's go back to
our Particle Emitter. So select this large
Debris Particle System, then click on this
little drop-down and select Duplicate
Particle System. Now you can see it
created the second one. So let's rename this one, double-click, and let's
call this one small debris. Now, very importantly,
even though we have to particle systems, they both Using
the same settings here at the bottom
that says large. You can see if I click
on both of them, they've got the same
settings right here. So what do we wanna
do is we want to duplicate the settings as well. So make sure you select your small Debris
Particle System. And then we're going
to click on this little icon right here. And this is going to
duplicate the large settings. So click on that. Now we can see the new
settings called large.001. So let's rename this to small. And now you can see if we
click on our large Debris, it shows our large settings and small Debris shows
the small settings. So now we can go and customize the small Emitter
settings to our needs. So let's go down to the Render Settings and
then under collection, let's change this
from Debris large to Debris small or right? And I think that's all we
need to change for now. Let's just make sure
we On the first frame, save your project and in
press Space to preview that. Another thing that we want
to do is let's go back to the emission section
of our small debris, and let's increase this
number 1000-10 thousand, so it just add 10 there. Go back to the first frame. And let's play that back
and see what we get. Now you can see we have
all these smaller pieces. So just something to
note is we can set a different seed value between these two Particle systems just to ensure that
they are slightly more, slightly different
and more random. So let's give the small Debris a see just a random
seed value like that. And now if we play this back, you can see we have
our small debris. Now we can maybe make it
a bit smaller as well. So let's go back to
the render section where we selected our
Debris small collection. And maybe let's just
bring the scale. You can play with
the scale here and see exactly what you need. We can maybe even increase
this number to 20,000. Let's see how that looks. Go back to the first
frame, press Space. And I can see we have
all these nice small, smaller pieces of
Debris bouncing around. So there you go. As you can see, it's
really easy to add some cool particle explosions are debris explosions
in your scene. Play around with us, see what you can create,
save your project. And then I will see you
in the next lesson.
10. Lesson 09: Create Cartoon Style Smoke Using Particle Simulations: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going
to show you how to create some Cartoon Style
Smoke Using Particles. Now we will look at how
we can change the scale of these Particles over
time by using textures. And then we're also going to
look at how we can fade out our Particles Using
material nodes. So I've got a new project here. So let's start by deleting
everything in the scene by pressing a X and
clicking Delete. Let's start off by creating
our Particle Emitter. So let's press Shift a mesh and let's
choose an IPO severe. So let's scale down
our Emitter slightly. And then let's just
apply the scale by pressing Control a
and choosing scale. Now, let's add our
particle system by going to the
Particles section you on the side and clicking the plus button to create
our particle system. Now for this we only
want 50 particles. So let's enter 50
next to the number. And then we also want to
change our frame duration. So currently our frame
duration is 1-250. So let's change at the,
at the bottom 1-100 only, we only want 100 frames. So in our particle settings, Let's change the frame start
and frame end to 1.100, so our Particles will only be released during this duration. Let's also increase
our lifetime to 100 as we don't want our
Particles to disappear. Now, before we go any further, let's create our
actual particle. So let's press Shift a mesh and let's create
another Ico, severe. But this time let's bring
down the subdivisions. So this menu that pops
up here in the corner, just expand it and let's bring down the subdivisions to one. So we're going to
create this low poly Smoke Style Animation. Let's move this particle just
out of the way by pressing G and X to just move it away
from our Particle Emitter. And let's maybe scale this
down slightly as well. And let's apply the
scale by pressing Control a and scale. Now, Let's also rename
this in the outliner. So let's just call
this particle. And let's call this
one our Emitter. Alright, remember to
save your project. Now let's go back to our
Particles settings and let's expand the velocity
section over here. So let's set the normal
velocity to zero as we don't want our Particles
going in all directions, we basically just want our
particles to go upwards. So let's set the Z
velocity to five. Now if we play this back, you can see that our
particles are shooting up and then they falling
down because of gravity. Now, let's go to the rotation section
and enable rotation. Let's expand this. And then let's set the
randomized value to one. Let's also take Dynamic for
some Dynamic rotations. And then under angular velocity, Let's change the axes to random and then set
the amount to one. This will just give
us a nice random spin to our Smoke Particles. Okay, so let's minimize the rotation section and
then let's go to render. And we want to render Using
our particle that we created. So we're going to set
this render as to object, and then we're going to select our particle from
the drop-down here. So let's have a
look and see what happens if we press Space. You can see our
particles are tiny. So let's just increase the scale to maybe around one point to this will be our
Smoke Particles. Alright, so as you can see, our particles are quite large. Don't worry too much about that. We will still adjust
that using the textures. Then we also don't want
to render our Emitter. So under the render section, just untick this show Emitter. Alright, so let's minimize their renders section and
let's go to field weights. And we want to bring
our gravity down. As currently can see, the gravity is quite
strong and it's just kinda pulling our
Smoke Particles down. Let's set the gravity to 0.3. Let's see how that works. And I can see our Smoke is
kinda slowly falling down, but it looks a lot better. Next we want to add
a wind force so that our Smoke particles are going
to the left of our scene. Let's create a force
by pressing Shift a and then go to force-field, and we simply going
to add a wind force. Now let's move
this wind force on the x-axis by pressing G X and just kinda
move it forward. And let's rotate it on the Y. So press R and Y and
can I just rotate it so it's an angle pointing
towards our Smoke Emitter. Now with this windfall selected, go to the Physics
tab and let's set the strength to
something around eight Let's play that back
and see what we get. And I can see our Smoke is kinda moving in the
right direction. You can obviously play
around with a string of the wind and set it to
something you are happy with. What we want to do next
is we want to change the scale of these
Particles over time. So we will now Smoke Particles
to start out quite small. And as they move upwards, we want to increase the
scale of these particles. So we can do that by using textures in our particle system. Let's go back to our
particle system, and now we're gonna go down to textures, just expand textures. And now we're going to create a new texture by clicking
this new button. So you can see it
created our new texture. And to go to that
texture settings, you can use this little
shortcut button right here, show texture in Texture tab. Or you can simply go to the texture panel here
on the right-hand side. So I'm going to use
this little shortcut here to jump to the
texture settings. And this is where we can choose what type of texture we want to use to influence the
scale of these particles. So right here at the
top we see type. This is where you can select
all these different types. And you can go ahead and play with these and see what they do. For this demonstration,
we're going to simply use a blend texture. As you can see, this is
almost just like a gradient. And you can also change the
type of gradient over year from linear and all of
these different settings. We're going to set
this to easing so we get a little bit
of a better gradient. Next, under the
mapping section here, we want to change
the coordinates from generated two
strand or particle. And that's just gonna
give us more control over our actual Particles. Next, let's go to the
influence Section year. As you can see, you
can influence all of these different parameters
by using this gradient. So we want to influence the size or the scale
of our Particles. So untick this general time
and then let's take scale. And instantly you can see something happening
in the viewport. You can see our
Particles start out very tiny and they get
bigger over time. So as you can see, if
we play this back, are Particles start out
very tiny and they get bigger and bigger as they
move upwards and to the left. You can also change this size influence to just kinda adjust how much you want those Particles to
be, to be influenced. Basically, I'm going to
set mine to one for now. Let's just pause
our particle system right here so we
can kinda see this. And now we're going to minimize
this influence section. And let's go to the colors
section right here. Next we're going to take this
color ramp and expand this. And this is where you can
control this gradient. You can use these
handles to control how it's influencing
your Particles. I can bring this
white section back to make the particles grow
bigger, more quicker. I can bring this
black inwards to change how the Particles
actually begin. I want the Particles to be slightly bigger
at the beginning. And an easy way to
do that is to change this black value to
something more gray. So just select this black handle at the beginning right here, and then click on
this black color and then you can just
bring it up slightly. So if we set this all
the way to white, you can see our Particles. We'll start off very large. And if we bring this down
all the way to black, you can see they will
start off as very small. So we're going to set
this guy in the middle, maybe somewhere around here. And you can control this
exactly the way you want. So now if we play this
back from the start, you can see our particles
are being emitted at that size and they grow
bigger as they move along. Alright, let's save our project. Alright, Next we're
going to look at materials and how we
can actually control the color of our Particles and also the transparency
of our Particles. I'm going to show
you how you can change the color over time. So you can start off with a certain color particle and then you can change
that color over time. And then I'm also going to
show you how you can use that same factor to determine the transparency
of your particles, which is something that
you can do a lot width. So I'm going to
select our particle in the viewport and
then I'm going to go to the shading tab right at the
top to set our material. So very importantly, we need to change over to the cycles render engine because some of the
nodes that we're going to use is only compatible
with cycles. So let's go to our Render
Settings here at the top, and let's change our
render engine two cycles. I'm going to set mine to GPU. And then right at the bottom, if I scroll down all the
way to color management, I just want to set the view
transform to standard. So we just have a little bit
more contrast and saturation So now we can change this to render view here
right at the top. And you can see we
have our Particles. So currently we using a default gray world environment or background color basically. So let's change this so we can see our Smoke a little better. So if you click this little
drop-down here at the top, you can untick this scene world. And then it will just
use the standard kind of material preview
environment just so that we can see the
Particles a little better. With our particle selected. Let's create our material by
clicking this new button. And let's just call
this Particles. Okay, so we're going to leave this principled BSD F shader and also the material output. And let's create a
new node by pressing Shift a and then
click on Search. Let's type particle. And then we're going to choose this Particle info node and
just place it over here. So this node gives you a lot of information
that you can actually use, such as the age
of your Particle, the lifetime, location,
size, velocity, etcetera. So really powerful things that
you can do with this node. So what I wanna do is I
want to create a math node. And then I'm going
to show you how you can determine a value 0-1 for the lifetime
of your particle. So as you can see, we've got
the Particle age right here, which is the frame number of your Particles as the
particle is born at, we'll begin at age
one on frame one, and then it will progress
to frame 100 or age 100. Then the lifetime is the lifetime of the particle
that will stay the same. And remember, we set this
lifetime to one-hundredth. So an easy way to get a
percentage is to just take our H value and
divide it by the lifetime. And that will give us a
value 0-1 that we can use for things like the color
and also the transparency. So it might sound a little bit confusing, but
let me show you. First of all, we're going
to create a math node. So shift a search and type math. So let's select a
normal math node. And then we're going to
change this to divide because we want to divide
these two numbers. So the top one we want
to connect our age, and then the bottom one we
want to connect the lifetime. So this means it's going to take the age value and it's going to divide it by the lifetime, and this value will
be the result. So next, let's create
a color ramp node, shift a search and
just type color. And you can place it
right here in the middle. And now we can
connect this value to the factor and this color
value to the base color. Now if we look at our Particles, you can see they starting
off quite dark and they go more white at the end. And we can adjust
these colors by just changing this
black and white value. So if I click on this
black here at the bottom, I can change this to
maybe like a red orange. And that will
change the color of the Particles at
the beginning of our as they being emitted
from this Particle Emitter. Then we can change the
white to anything else. We can maybe make it pink. You can see now it's going
from orange to pink. And you can also adjust these handles to
adjust how you want to change that gradient
or how you want to influence the color
of these Particles. I'm going to make it from
orange to a gray kinda color. Maybe just take out
all the saturation. We can maybe take
out all of that. And just something like a, just a gray color like that. Because what we're
gonna do is we can have these particles come out. They will change color
and then we're going to fade them out as they
get here to the end. Now let's see how we can use this same value that we
created or that we calculated by using the age
and the lifetime to influence the transparency
of our particles. Now it's actually
quite easy to do. So let me just
expand this or make this full screen so you can
see the nodes a bit better. So what we wanna do is we want
to create another shader. So press Shift a search
and type transparent. And we're going to use
this transparent BSD F, which is a shader on its own. And we're going to mix between this principled BST F shader
and this transparent P, S D F shader by using these
values that we calculate it. Now we need a mix shader node to mix between
these two shaders. So let's create that
now by pressing Shift a search and type in mix. Now very importantly,
we need to select the mix shader
because we're going to mix between these two shaders Now let's place this
node right here between our principal BST F
and R material output. And then let's also connect this transparent to this
mix shader as well. Now if we go back and we'll
look at our viewport, we can use this factor
or this mix shader to mix between
complete transparency. As you can see,
they're all complete opaque by just using
this factor value. This is where we will
basically connect this value that we
calculated here. So to mix that we need
another color ramp. So I'm going to create
another color and by pressing Shift a search and
type in color, then select Color Ramp, and let's just place it
above our other color ramp. Now, let's connect this
value to the factor. And then we're going to
connect this color output from this color ramp to our
mix shader factor. So let's just move
this out of the way to make things a little bit neater. So let me just maybe
move that there so I can see it's using
this color ramp to control this mix shader
that's mixing between the transparent shader and our orange and gray
base, base color. So now if we go back
and see what we get, you can see that our Particles
are becoming more and more transparent as they
go towards the left. We can control this by
adjusting this new color ramp. So if I bring this
black value in, you can see the transparency
is getting less and less. And if we bring this back and we bring this white value inwards, you can see that's affecting the end of this transparency. You can choose exactly
where you want your Smoke Particles
to cannot disappear. So I'm going to set
it to around here. Now, just a quick side note. I noticed sometimes if you're using quite
a lot of particles, you might get some
black artifacts when doing this
transparency setup. Now, I'm not sure
if this is a bug or maybe just
something on my Mac, but I did find a workaround. So if you see any, I think we can actually
see one right here. If I zoom out. So I think I can see a
little artifact right there. So if you get that, let me show you how to fix that. So under the Render
Settings here on the side, if you go to light paths, you simply need to click these little dots on
this right-hand side, and then you choose full
global illumination. Now this will just
increase the number of light bounces in your scene. That will usually
just fix that error. You can also leave this
on default and then just increase this transparent max bounces to something like 32. And that should
also resolve it by just increasing the transparent. But I usually just
change this to full global illumination
and it sets everything to 32 max bounces. And that usually works great. So now if we go
back to the layout and we change this
over to render, you can see our particles
are fading out nicely. I'm just going to
change our lighting to not use our scene world, but using the default
Material background just to see our Particles
a little better. Now we can go ahead and
bake our Particles. So I'm gonna go to the Emitter and go to our
Particles settings. Then let's go to cash and
simply click on bike. Alright, so now you can see
our particles are cached so we can just scrub the timeline
to view our creation. And as you can see, let
me just play that back. You can see our
Particles of fading out right around here,
which is pretty cool. So as you can see, using
textures and doing some math, Using the material
nodes can give you some really, really
powerful results. Because you can change the size or the scale of your
Particles over time. And you can also use that age calculation to do different things with
your Particle materials. You can see I simply just
parented my Emitter to this little toy train model
and it works pretty great. So I'm also including this train model in
the asset section. So you can have a look
at that Blender file if you want to use it. So go ahead, play around
with these textures and these material nodes and
see what you can Create. And I will see you
in the next lesson.
11. Lesson 10: Water Drops On Surface Using Hair Particles: Hey and welcome back. In this lesson, we're gonna look at Hair Particles and how we can use Hair Particles to create
water droplets on a Surface. Now, the difference between the normal Particles and
Hair Particles is basically, Hair Particles will
be generated on a surface or a
volume of vertices, just as normal Particles, but they will be stuck to
that specific location. So they won't fly off the
object as normal Particles do, if that makes any sense. But let me show you what I mean. First of all, let's delete
everything in our scene by pressing a and then
X and click Delete. So let's now create an
object that we can use as the surface where we're
going to place these droplets. So let's create a
simple soda can. Press Shift a mesh and cylinder. And let's expand this, Add Cylinder window
you at the bottom. And let's increase
the vertices to 64. So we have something that's
a little bit more smoother. Now with us objects selected press Tab to go into edit mode, then press 32, go into face select mode and
select this top phase. Then move it up by pressing
G and Z and just move it up. So we have something that
looks like a soda can. We can also move it up
so it's above the grid. By pressing G and Z, I can just placing
it right there. Now let's change the shading
so we don't see these faces. So simply right-click on this model and select
shade auto smooth. And that will just give us a
nice smooth view and render. Let's also apply the
scale of this object. So press Control a
and select scale. Let's call this our soda can. Next we need a droplet or a water drop that we're going
to use as our Particles. For that we can simply
add another ecosphere. So I'm going to press Shift
a mesh and then I ecosphere. And let's just move this to
the side by pressing G and X. So let's rename it
in the outliner. We can just call it drop. Now, let's press Tab to go into edit mode and then press
one for vertex select mode. And then let's also enable
proportional editing. Now we can just look at this
from the side and select this bottom vertices and
bring it up by pressing G. And then you can use
the mouse wheel, oh, page up and page down just to
create like a flat surface where this water droplet
will sit on the surface. You can also bring this
top vertex down slightly, just squishing it down. And then let's just make this so it's not perfectly round. I'm looking at
this from the top, and I'm just selecting
some of these vertices and Using the
proportional editing to kinda just squish them in. Maybe something like that. Can maybe bring in
the top a little bit, little bit down, even maybe until we have
something like that. Now let's duplicate this to
create a few variations. So I'm going to press
Shift D and then press X to move it
along the x-axis. And maybe let's just rotate
this one on the z-axis. So I'm pressing R and Z. Let's maybe scale
it down slightly, go into edit mode. And let's just move some
of these vertices around so it's not exactly the same
shape as the other one. Let's do it one more time. So I'm going to
duplicate this one, Shift D and then X to
move around the x-axis. Let's go into edit mode and maybe let's just
bring this one, Make it a little bit more
flatter than the other ones. Maybe, maybe let's
bring that in and maybe also just kinda move it around so it's not
exactly the same shape. I'm also going to
rotate it on the Z. Now I just want to
apply the scale of all these water droplets so
you can select all of them, Control a and then apply scale. Now let's place them
all in a collection. So I'm going to
select all of them, press M New Collection and
let's call this Drops. Alright, so now we have our Drops collection
in the outliner. And we can use that to place our water droplets
across this object. So with the can select it. Let's go to our particle
settings here on the side, and let's create our
particle system. So obviously you can see
by default it's going to create a normal
Emitter particle. So if we press Space, you'll see particles being
emitted from that object. But that's not what we want. We want to use Hair Particles. So you can see you've got these two options,
Emitter and here. We simply going to click
on this button right here. As you can see, we now
have hair on our can. And if you presuppose,
nothing will happen. Those Hair Particles, we'll
just stick to that location Okay, So obviously
we don't want to render Hair Particles
on this object, but we want to render
those droplets. So let's go to the render section here under the Particles
and changes from render as path to collection because we want
to use our Drops collection. So choose collection. And then where it says
instance collection, let's choose Drops. Now you can see our Drops are being placed on the scan object, but it's not looking great. So if we go back to the
emission section and source, you can see it's currently
being emitted from the phases. And if we select our soda can and press Tab to
go into edit mode, you can see that it doesn't
have a lot of phases, has got these long faces on the side and then obviously also the
top and bottom phase. So we need to add
more faces so that they are more places to place
these droplets on the can. So let's add some loop cuts. So I'm going to press
Control or Command R to create a new loop
cut and then simply increase this number
of cuts until you have something that looks like that. You want these small
little square faces. So now you can see
we've got all of these little tiny faces and that's where those droplets
are going to be placed. You can also increase the
number of faces on top and on the bottom if
you want to do that. So I can simply Shift-click to select
both of these faces, then press I to create
an inset like that. And then I again, I again until you have a
few faces that you are, or the amount of faces
that you are happy with. Now let's go out of edit
mode by pressing Tab, you can see the Drops
are more randomly placed around our object. But as you can see, the Drops
On not rotated correctly, they kind of sticking
out on this side. So let's see how
we can fix that. So an easy way to do
this is to rotate these drop objects in edit mode to change
the orientation. So let me show you what I mean. Let's select our first
droplet press Tab to go into edit mode. And then we're going to
select all the phases. So press a to select everything. And now we can
simply rotate it and see which way we
need to rotate it. So this is placed on
our object correctly. So let's begin by
pressing rotate, and then let's try
the y-axis first. And as you can see, I
can rotate it and it doesn't really align
to the right angle. So let's try are an X to rotate around the x-axis and
now we're getting something. So if I rotate it all
the way to this angle, and if you look at the top of this screen right here
where it says Edit Mode. If I rotate that again, you can see the value
right here at the top. So if I want to rotate
it around to this angle, you can see it's got a value
right at the top of -90. So let's just type that on the
keyboard -90, press Enter. So now this droplet is
actually orienting correctly. Now let's do the same with the other two droplets as well. So let's select the second one. Press Tab, press a to select
all the faces and then RAX. And it see that's not the
right rotation angle. So let's try are and why? Now you can see that's
rotating in the correct axes. So if we look at this
value here at the top, I can see we need to rotate
this about 90 degrees. So I'm going to type
90, press Enter, and I can see that
droplet is also positioned correctly
or rotated correctly. So let's do the same
with a loss droplet. So click on the lost
small droplet, press Tab, press a to select
all the faces and it's rotated around the x-axis. You can see that is the correct axes and we have
a value of 90 yet the top. So I'm just going to press 90, Enter on the keyboard. And now our droplets are rotated correctly
around our object. Another thing we can
do is we can change all these droplets from
shade flat to shade smooth. So I'm just going to
select this either shade smooth or auto smooth. I think let's go
with a Shade Smooth. And I can see they
are nice and smooth. We don't see the faces. And let's select our
can objects and go back to our Particles settings. So let's go to their
renders section and let's decrease the scale of our Drops. And then also increase the scale randomness
all the way to one. So we get like a
nice random scale. We can also increase
the amount of droplets if you go to
the emission section You can increase the
number of particles. So maybe let's make
this 5,000 for now. And we can also change
how it's distributed. So currently it's
set to jittered. You can change this to a random. Sometimes that
gives a little bit of a more random result, but you can play around with
these and see what you get. You can also antique this
random order or tick even distribution and see if
you get any better results. Now, let's see, we can add some random rotation
to these droplets. As you can see, we don't have a rotation section under
the Hair Particles. But to show that we just need
to take this advanced box. I'm not sure why
they still do this, and not just keeping the rotation section
here by default. But if you take this advanced, then you will get access
to the rotation tab. So let's go ahead and take this rotation box and expand it. And what we can do
here is if we leave this orientation axes
to velocity and Hair, we can increase
this phase value. And as you can see, our
droplets are rotating. If we set this or if
we change this value, set the phase value to one, and then we can increase
the randomized phase, randomize that rotation
so they're not all rotating the same
amount basically. So this is just a nice, easy way to change the rotation of these
droplets to be more random. Okay, let's create a simple
material for our Drops. So I'm going to expand this Drops collection
in the outliner, select the first drop, and let's go to the shading tab. Let's change our
renderer two cycles. So I'm gonna go to
the render settings, change the render
engine two cycles. Let's set this to GPU, and let's set the color
management to standard as well, just to get that
more contrast look. Now let's change
this to render view. Let's change our scene world to just use the material preset. Now select the first
drop and let's click this New button to create
our material for the Drops. Let's give this a name as well. Let's just call the
drop or water drop. And what we want to do is
we want to delete this principled be SDF shader
selected, press X. And I can see we don't have
any material on that drop. So let's create a new node
by pressing Shift a search. And we're going
to type in gloss. So we're going to
use this gloss be STF shader for our droplets. Now we can simply connect
this BST F2, our surface. And now you can see
we starting to get that nice gloss
transparent look. We want to assign
the same material to these other two drop objects. So simply select
the second drop. Click on this little drop-down
here and choose drop. And let's do the same
with the third one, selected and choose drop. Now you can see they're all
using the same material. If we change the color
of this material, they all will change. So we can maybe give
this like a very, very slight blue saturation. Maybe like a 0.070, 0.05, maybe just to
give a slight Britain. You can obviously change
this any way you want to. And you can also
change the roughness. If I increase the roughness
all the way to one, these droplets will
be very mad looking. And if we decrease this
all the way to zero, they will be almost mirror-like, so they will reflect
a lot of light. So maybe let's set this to 0.1. Then what we can
also do is we can increase the light bounces. So if we go to our render tab here on the right-hand side, and then we expand light paths. And then we can set this to
full global illumination. That usually just looks better on any transparent objects like gloss or liquid at we'll just
give you a better render. So maybe let's give our
can a material as well. So I'm going to select
our soda can, click New. And maybe for this
one, let's just create a metallic looking object. So I'm going to
change the base color to a little bit more of a gray. And then let's increase
metallic all the way to one. And we can also play
with a roughness to see how rough or smooth we
want that metal to be. And yeah, let's go
back to the layout, changes over to render. And let's click on this
drop-down to disable seen world. So we're just looking at
the default material, HDRI. You're going obviously
add your own HDRI to preview it like that. But sometimes I just prefer to use the non sealant seen world, just this default to
preview it quickly. So play around with these Particles settings
play around with a number of droplets you see and also the scale of your droplets. And also change the material
and see what you can create. Remember to save your project. And then I will see you
in the next lesson.
12. Lesson 11: Scatter Rocks Using Hair Particles: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're
going to look at how we can Scatter Rocks Or any other objects across a
Surface Using Hair Particles. But then we're also
going to control the density using
white painting. Let's start by
deleting everything in our scene by pressing a
X and clicking Delete. Now, let's create a
few rock Objects. Now you can obviously import
your own Iraq measures, or you can create
them using add-ons. But for this example, we simply going to
use some Ico spheres. So press Shift a mesh
and then I ecosphere. And let's just move this off
to the side by pressing G X. So we have a deer on the side. So let's go into edit
mode by pressing tab, and let's enable proportional editing right here at the top. So now let's take some of these vertices and kinda
just move them around, increasing the
proportional editing by using your mouse wheel or
page up and page down. And then let's just move some of these points around so we get something that looks almost
something like Iraq. Let's duplicate this one
by pressing Shift D, and then you can press Shift Z to move it on that same plane. Let's go into edit mode, and let's just move some
of these points around. Memoryless Scatter
down slightly first. And we can also rotate it
around and then go into edit mode and then just move
some of these points around. Let's create another
one, Shift D, and then Shift Z to move
around the same plane. Let's rotate it on the
Z by pressing R and Z. And then maybe let's
scale it slightly, go into edit mode and then move some of
these points around. We just want a few variations. So let's do one more
shift, D, shift Z, maybe let's rotate it on
the Z by pressing R, Z, Scatter down, go into edit mode and moving some
of these points around. As you can see,
my pivot point is also underneath these objects, so they will sit
nicely on the surface. To change the pivot
point easily, you can just select the object, go into edit mode, select everything by pressing a, and then press G and Z to move your object without
moving the pivot point. So you can look at
this from the side. You can just move this up
until that pivot point is kinda setting at the bottom
of this rock object. So do that for all
the rock Objects. Now let's select
our Rocks press M, New Collection, and let's
call this Rocks press. Okay. Now you can see all
the rock Objects are inside of this Rocks collection. Alright, so let's create our surface where we will
be placing these Rocks. For that we simply going
to create a plane, press Shift a mesh and plane. And let's scale it up a bit. So it's about, let's
make it 10 m by 10 m. Let's also apply the scale by pressing Control a and scale. That reminds me to also apply the scale of our rock Objects. So select all the
rocks and then press Control a and select
scale to apply the scale. Now select the plane object, go to the Particles tab, press Plus to create that
new Particle System. And we want to create another
Hair Particles System. So select Hair and
then you can see the normal path air Objects. So let's go down to
the render section and changes from
path To Collection. And then we want to instance
our Rocks collection. And I can see we have our Rocks scattered
across the surface. You can see they are not
aligned or rotated correctly. So we can fix this by individually
rotating these rocks. So simply you want to enable the object rotation year under this collection
section under render. So that means if we tick
this box object rotation, it's going to use the
rotation of these objects. So let's select our first rock, and I'm going to press
R Y and just rotate them and you can see how
they change on our surface. So again, if we look at this number here at the
top of the viewport, I can figure out that
we need to rotate this rock at 90 degrees
on the keyboard. Just type 90 Enter
and I can see that one rock is rotated
or aligned correctly. Let's do that with
our second rock. Some just going to
select it here, press R and Y. And you just want to see which sometimes it
won't be on the y-axis. Sometimes you have to
go RX and see, okay, that's not the correct
alignment. Let's try RY. And you can see we can place
them flat on the ground by rotating if I'm looking
at the number yet the top 90 degrees. So I'm just going to type
90 Enter on the keyboard. And now that rock is
also aligned correctly Let's do it for
this rock as well. So I'm going to rotate
around the y-axis, and that's also 90 degrees. And finally the last rock, let's rotate also on the Y, and that's also 90 degrees. Now you can see
all the Rocks are aligned correctly
on the surface. So before we look at
the wait painting, Let's add some random
rotation to these particles. So let's go to the
Particles section and now we're going to enable this advanced again to get
access to the rotation tab. So let's take
rotation, expand that. And all we have to do
is increased phase. As you can see, they're all
will rotate exactly the same. So increase the phase 21. And then we add some
phase randomness by just increasing this
to all the way to two. And I can see the Rocks
are rotated randomly. Go ahead and save
your project now. So next we can select
the plane object. And then we're going to go to the Data Properties
section here on the side, this little green triangle. And now we're going to
create our vertex group. So simply click on this little
plus and you'll see it's going to create a new
vertex group here. Let's rename this so we just keep track of
what we're doing. I'm gonna call this Rocks, and that will control the
density of these Rocks. Now what we can do is we can go back to our particle system. And then I'm going to scroll
down to vertex groups, expand that and you can see you can control the
density, the length, the clumping, all of these extra parameters by
using different vertex groups. So we want to
control the density with the vertex group
we just created. So I'm simply going to click
on this box next to density, and I'm going to select that
vertex group called Rocks. Now you can see
nothing is happening in the viewport because we need to add some white painting
to that vertex group. Now before we can add
some white painting, we need to add some extra
faces to this plane. If you select this
plane press tab, you can see we only
have this one big face. So we can simply
right-click and select sub-divide and just expand this little menu
here at the bottom. And let's increase the number of cuts to something like 50. So we get all of these
faces on our plane. Now press tab again to
go back to object mode. Now with this vertex
group selected, we can go to this drop-down menu right here at the top of the viewport. And we're going to change
this now to white painting. Now you can see we can
start to paint on this. Let's undo that and let's adjust the white
here at the top. So let's increase our
brush size by pressing F on the keyboard and just
moving the mouse sideways. So that will
increase or decrease this brush that we're
going to paint with. And then it can also adjust
the strength here at the top. So if you want to, if you
want to paint 100% string, you can set this to one, or let's bring this
down to about 0.5, like 50 per cent string. Now you can simply just
click and drag and paint your weight painting. So obviously we can
now see the rocks being scattered
cross this plane. Only way we have a weight
value bigger than one. So let's say if we
set this, wait, but all the way to zero and
we set the string to one, we can kinda erase these Rocks just by
painting blue again. And then if you want to
paint in the Rocks again, we can set our way
to one or maybe to zero point something and
bring the strength down. And obviously it can
increase the radius. You can either use
this slightly at the top or just that if shortcut. And then you can simply
just paint in those Rocks. This will give you
a lot of control to exactly place your Rocks into our direct your scene where you want those
Hair Particles to be. So as you can see, I
can add more Rocks in the middle of this plane. And then I can bring
down this wait and paint darker blue on the edges to remove the
Rocks from these areas. You can obviously then
go back to object mode. And under Particles,
you can still control the amount of particles year
by the emission section. So if we make this 100,
so as you can see, they will still be
scattered around those wait, painted areas. So maybe let's increase
this to around 250. And then we can
obviously go down to the render section and we can change the scale
of our rock CIA. And we can add some scale
or randomness as well. And then you can simply go back, select a plane, go back
to white painting. And you can start painting and place the Rocks as you wish. And as you can see,
this will just give you so much control for controlling the density
of these particles. Placing a Rocks Or any other
object across a Surface. Go ahead and play around
with a white painting. See what you gain, Create, then save your project. And I will see you
in the next lesson.
13. Lesson 12: Realistic Grass Using Hair Particles: Hi and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going
to look at how to create Realistic Grass Using
Hair Particles. And we're also going to
look at wait painting, how to distribute or place
your growth on an object. And then we're also
going to look at Using children Particles, as well as dynamics
Using Forces. So let's get started. So first of all, I've got a brand new
project and let's delete everything by pressing a X
and then clicking Delete. Next, I've created a
Blender file that you can find in the Assets
with this course. And we're going to
import or a pinned some of those Grass objects
that I've included. Now just a quick note, these Assets are available on the epic mega scans collection so you can
get it from there. So I didn't create these Assets, but you can obviously
either use them or you can create your own
Grass Assets to use. So let's see how we can
import those Grass Objects. So click on File and then
append and then browse to the location where
you downloaded the Grass collection blend file. Double-click on
that Blender file, and then double-click on the
collection folder because everything is already inside a collection in the spleen file. You'll see there's a
collection and also grass. So we're going to
import or append this Grass collection
selected and click Append. Now you will see at we'll import these Grass objects into
your scene and it will, can I just place it
off to the side? We can maybe move
it a little bit further away because I
think the plane where we're going to place
our Grass might be a little bigger than this area. So with all these gross
objects selected, press G, X and just kinda move
them a little bit further away from the
middle of the scene. So if you look at the outliner, you can see we've got
all these Grass objects and they inside this
collection called gross. So you can either just minimize
this or we can actually switch it off completely so we don't see it in the viewport, but we can leave it on for now. Next, let's create
the plane object where we're going
to place our grass. So press Shift a mesh and
we're going to create a simple plane with a plane selected press N to
bring up this side menu. And we're going to set the
dimensions of X and Y to 15 to create a nice big plane for us to create our Grass on. Let's apply the scale. So with a plane selected,
press Control a, and then select scale
just to set the X, Y, Z scale back to one. Then press N to hide
that side menu. Now let's subdivide
this plane so we have more faces to work with. So with the plane selected, press Tab to go into Edit
Mode, then press 32, go into face select mode, and then right-click
and choose sub-divide. Now we're going to
sub-divide this quite a bit. So just expand this little
menu here at the bottom. And let's set the number of cuts to 50 and then press Enter. Now you can see we have all
these faces to work with. What we can also do is just
create some slope to this. So just select some
random phases by holding Shift and then enable proportional editing
right here at the top. Then with these faces
selected, press G, Z to move them up and then use the mouse wheel or page
up and page down to just kinda increase this area just to create a little
bit of uneven surface. Alright, so press Tab to
go back to object mode. And let's set this
to shade smooth by right-clicking and
then Shade Smooth. Ok, so now we're ready to add our particle system to this
plane with a plane selected. Let's go to the Particles tab
here on the right-hand side and click the plus sign to
create our particle system. Now let's call this grass. So I'm just going to
double-click here and call this grass. You can give it any name. Next we want to use
Hair Particles. So simply click on this
hey button and you will see that we have these
Hey paths on our Surface. Now, let's leave the number of particles at 1,000 for now, we can always adjust
that a little bit later. Next, let's go to
the render section. So I'm just going to minimize this emission section,
go to render. And we don't want
to render as paths, but we want to render our
collection of gross Objects. Select collection here. And then where it says
instance collection, this is where we're going to
choose our gross collection. Now you can see
something is happening. We do have some gross, but the scale is very tiny. Let's increase the scale here. And you can see we get
our gross Objects. And then we can also
introduce some randomness by just bringing this
scale randomness all the way up to one. Maybe let's set the
scale to around 0.5. Let's see how that looks. Now we're also going to make
use of children Particles. So this will be a lot more
dense in our final render. Now what you can
do is if some of these Grass Objects or
too big or too small, you can actually come to
our collection here and you can scale some of these
objects individually. As you can see it,
we'll just kinda scale those objects
in the scene. So let's say, for instance, this object fields a
little bit too big. We can scale it down, and it will only scale that
one object on this plane. If you see that some of your
gross Objects are orienting incorrectly if they may be lying flat or if they upside down. So you can simply come to
our collection Objects, click on one of these objects, and then you press Tab
to go into edit mode. And then With all those vertices selected by pressing
a, you can rotate. It may be around the y-axis. So praise or why you
can rotate it or, or Z and just kinda align it
to the correct orientation. And as you can see,
the Particle System is actually updating. So I hope that makes sense. And then once you're done, go back into object mode, and then you can click
on this plane again. Now, let's add a bit of a
random rotation to this. So in our particle settings, Let's click Advanced
right here at the top to enable that
rotation drop-down. And then we're
going to take this rotation and we simply going to increase the phase and
also the Randomize. And I can see our Grass Objects are rotated a little
bit more randomly. Now, let's see how
we can use children Particles to increase the amount of gross we have on our plane. So let's scroll down
and go to children, and we simply going to
click on interpellate it. Now, as you can see, we have a lot more Grass
objects in our scene. And you can also see under
the children's section, we have a display amount
and also a render amount. So the render amount
is set to 100 and the display amount
that's displayed in the viewport is set to ten. So this is just something
to keep in mind that this will look completely
different if you render it, it will have a lot
more particles. So what you can do is you can increase the display amount to 100 to show all the
particles in the viewport. But that can obviously slow down your viewport quite a lot. So I'm going to bring
the display amount back to about 50 maybe. And maybe a little bit less. It's still quite slow. So maybe let's bring
it down to ten. You can obviously go to the
emission section and you can change the number of particles
right there at the top. So these will be the
parent Particles. And then for every
parent particle, that's going to create
100 child Particles. So just keep that in mind so
you can obviously play with that number and see how
that affects the scene. So I'm going to leave
the emission number on 1,000 for now. So under the children's
section here, under interpellate, it maybe let's change the
render amount to 50. And let's quickly look
at that by changing the display amount
of 50 as well. And I think something like
this looks quite nice. So I'm going to leave
the render amount on 50. So this is the result that
we will get in the render. So now we can bring our
display amount down to ten just to increase the
speed of our viewport. Remember to save your project. Now there's a few things we can do under this
children's section. As you scroll down, you can see we've got potting, clumping, roughness, and kink. Now these are just some
settings you can change the way that the children Particles
are placed on the object. So for instance, if we go into the clumping section and I
bring down this clumping, can see how those particles are kinda clumped, been
clumped together. So these are just kinda some parameters that
you can change. You can play around with
them and see what they do. Maybe the roughness,
you can increase the uniform roughness or
the size of that roughness. And we'll just give
you a little bit of variation for these
children Particles. Next, we're going to use wait, painting to distribute our
gross objects onto this plane. So let's go and hide
our Particles for now. So with a plane,
objects selected under Particles here right at the top where we have our gross
Particles System. Just click this
little monitor icon to hide it from the viewport. Now with the plane selected, click on this Data tab, you are on the right-hand side. And this is where
we're going to create our vertex group that's going to have the white
painting information in it. So let's click on this plus
to create a new vertex group. And let's call this grass. You can call it gross density. But for now, let's
just call it gross. Now with this plane
objects is still selected. Let's click this drop-down
here at the top. Then select white paint. Now you will see we in
that wait painting mode. And this is where you
can set your weight at the top and the radius of your brush and
also the strength. So I'm going to set
the way to one. And I'm simply just
going to add some Some of that year. So
simply just paint. You can use F2, increase
the brush size, and you can also bring
down the strength to make the painting
slightly less arche. So you can just
paint around if I bring maybe that down to, maybe just add a
little bit of green, maybe something like that. And you can also set the
weight all the way down to zero to paint blue, which will be areas where
there will be no grass at all. So blue is basically zero density and red
is full density. You can take this
all the way up and maybe draw some red in here. Alright, so we can always
come back and change this. So for now, let's
click this Drop-down again and choose object mode. Now if we go back to our Particles settings and we go all the way down
to vertex groups. This is where we
can set the density Using the vertex group
we just created. If you click here, you can see
there is our vertex group. And if I selected, we just need to enable or show our Particles again by enabling this little
monitor right at the top. And instantly you can see
that our gross Particles are now only growing in those
areas that we painted. I can now select the
plane object again, go back to this data
panel here on the side, and then change this
back to white painting. Now I can simply just
go ahead and I can paint wherever I want
and add some grass. They can see it's
updating in real time. So this is pretty nice just
to kinda add your grass. So maybe I have like a river or a stream flowing
in the center. Then we can maybe just
bring that down and just paint that area where
we don't want any grass. So I have some FUN
and just paint your gross wherever you want to have your gross Particles. And then once you are done, you can change back
to object mode. So currently if we
play this back, nothing will happen
as we have not enabled a dynamics in
our particle system yet. So let's do that now
and see if we can add a slight wind to our grass. So click on a plane object and let's go to a Particles System. And you're at the top,
you'll see Hair dynamics. Now we can simply just
enable this and let's expanded because the
default settings, if you play this back now, you will see that the
gross will rotate in a really weird way
and it will kinda lie flat because of gravity. That's not really what we want. So let's go back to
the first frame. And what I want to do
is I want to increase this pin goal strength
under the Hair dynamics. So by default is set to zero. So let's set this to one. What this does is it will
try and keep the shape of our Hair Particles
that will be more difficult to bend that
Hair Particles down. So this will just
make our Particles bend and move a little bit less. So yeah, just set this to one. And now if we play this back, you can see it's still
rotating weirdly, but we can make
some more changes. So let's get down to
field weights and let's bring the gravity down to 0.2. And if we play this
back now you can see we have a little
bit less movement, but it's still kinda spinning
around non-weird way. Maybe let's go back
to our Dynamics, Hair dynamics, and
let's increase the pen goal strength to three. So that will make
our Particles even stronger or stiffer and
they won't move as much. So let's have a look. And you can see how that's
looking pretty nice. As you can see, our grass
is kinda moving around, but let's add a force to be able to control this
a little bit better. So in the viewport, press Shift a and then go to force-field and
select turbulence. Now this turbulence false, we'll just add a little bit of a random movement to our grass. So let's just move the
turbulence force up slightly by pressing G and Z is just
so that we can see it. And with the
turbulence selected, go to the Physics tab
here on the side. And here we can set
the strength and the size and the noise
amount for this turbulence. So by default this is
set to strength one. Let's increase this to around
four for the strength, the size of the turbulence
we want quite big. So let's set this to 500. You can obviously experiment and see how this affects your grass. And then we also want to
introduce some noise. So let's set the
noise amount ten. Alright, let's see what we get. See if I play this back, you can see we definitely have some nice movement in the grass. You can obviously decide if, if it's moving too
much or too little. So you can just go to your
force, the turbulent force, and maybe bring down
the string to like 0.5 if you want less movement. And then also just remember to click on your Particle System. And sometimes you just need to update the number
of particles just to reset that Particle System so it shows you the
correct results. You can also change the seed amount here
just to kinda give you a little bit of a
random noise effect. Once you're happy with your
dynamics and with a forces, we can always go back
into this white painting, an add or remove the
gross as you wish. So this is just a
really nice System to easily just kinda odd direct your scene and kinda move things around exactly
where you want it. So let's do a quick
render to just see how gross is looking. So I'm just going to
place my view angle around here and then I'm
going to create a camera. So press Shift a and
then select camera. Now what we can do is click
on View and then Align View. And then we're going to choose a line active camera to view. And that's just going to snap our camera to our current view. So you can obviously
press G and you can move the camera around a bit. But let's say we want to take
a stole from this angle. Now, let's go to our
render settings and change our render engine
from E v2 cycles. And then I'm going to
set my device to GPU. Then let's go to
the world settings to add an HDRI for our lighting. So click on this little
dot next to color, then choose environment texture, and then click on Open. Now, browse to your HDRI folder, or you can use some
of the HDRI is provided with this course. And I'm just gonna go with
this driving school for K. So open that. And now we can change over to the render view right
here at the top. So as you can see, our gross
is looking pretty cool. But remember we're not seeing all the children Particles
in the viewport. So let's change back to Solid
View right here at the top. And the see all the Particles we need to actually do a render. So I'm somebody
going to click on render and then render image. Alright, as you
can see, the grass is looking really cool. And yeah, this is just
a really nice system for scattering objects
across a surface. So play around with us, see what you can create. Remember to save your project. And then I will see you
in the next lesson.
14. Lesson 13: Sci-Fi Structure Details Using Hair Particles: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, I'm
going to show you how to easily Add Details To a sci-fi model or building or anything really Using
Hair Particles. So let's begin by
deleting everything in the scene by pressing a
X and clicking Delete. Now, let's create
our Structure or our building model where we're going to place these Details on. So let's create a
new cube by pressing Shift a mesh and cube, and let's just move it up so it's sitting on top of the grid. Suppress GZ holding control. So it's snapping to that grid and just
move it one up so you can see the cube is now sitting
perfectly on this grid. So let's scale it now
by pressing S and Shift Z so that we only
scaling on the X and Y. So let's just bring
it out a bit, maybe something like that. And then before we start
editing this mesh, let's just apply the
scale by pressing Control a and selecting scale. Now, let's go into edit mode by pressing Tab and then press 32, go into face select mode. Now let's select
this face and let's move it up by pressing G and Z, just something like that. Now let's press I to create an inset and just move the mouse so it's
something like this. Then let's press E
again to extrude. Then let's press it
again and extrude again. Maybe let's move this
face up even more. So press G and Z and just move it up until you
have something like that. Now let's press E
for extrude again, and then immediately press
S to scale that out. And then press E and
extrude upwards, right? So let's add a few loop
CATIA by pressing Control R. And you can use your mouse wheel to increase the number of cuts, or you can just use the
slider year on the side. Let's create like
three loop cuts. With these loop gets selected. Let's press Control B to bevel them and just
pull them out slightly. Now let's extrude these faces
inwards by pressing Alt or Option and E. And
then you're going to select extrude faces
along normals. And this will
actually extrude them either outwards or inwards. So let's create
something like that. I think that's pretty cool For our basic bolding Structure. Now, let's create
our Particle mesh. Now for this, we simply going
to create a basic cube. So press Shift a mesh and cube, and it's just move this cube
out of the way by pressing G and X just to move
it along the x-axis. Alright, so that's
gonna be our particle. So let's just rename
this two Particle, and let's rename
this one to bolding. Remember to save your project. Alright, so now we can start setting up our particle system. Let's click on our
building structure. Let's go to the
Particles Settings tab. You're on the side. Let's click the Plus button
and let's call this Details. Now we're going to use
Hair Particles for this. So click here to enable
the Hair Particles System. Now, let's go to the
render section and change render as from path to Object because we want to use our cube particle
object as the particle. So where it says
instance object, Let's just click the and
select our Particle mesh. Alright, so now we
can see our cubes are being placed on our
building structure. Let's just change the settings to make it look a little better. So let's go back to our Particles settings
and let's enable advanced by taking
this box here at the top so that we get
access to the rotation. So let's enable rotation, and let's change the
Orient axes from velocity here to normal. Now, let's increase
the phase amount. And as you can see, our cubes are rotating on the structure. And let's leave the randomized
Phase on zero for now, we can always come back and add some random rotation
later if we want to. Now, let's go back to
our render settings and let's just adjust the scale here and let's
increase the scale of randomness all
the way to one. Now that we get a little
bit of variation in size. Next, we're going to
enable children Particles. So let's minimize
this render section and then let's go to children
and click interpellate it. Now let's change the
amount of children to ten. So just sit there,
render amount it ten, which is the same as
the display amount. That means we will see
exactly the same amount of particles in our render
as in the viewport. Now we can also go back
to the emission section. And here we can increase or decrease the number
of parent particles. So you can choose a
number that kinda looks right for your structure. But I think something like
this looks pretty cool. Now let's set up our lighting
and other materials. So first of all, let's go
to our render settings and change our render
engine two cycles. I'm going to use my GPU year. And then right at the bottom, expand color management and set the view transform
to standard, just so that we get a little bit more contrast in our render. So now we can go to the
world settings and click on this little dot next to
color to load in an HDRI Let's click on environment
texture and then open. Now you can go ahead and
use any HDRI you want. But I'm going to use
this nice overcast sky HDRI and then click Open Image. And now we can change over to the render view right
here at the top. Now let's go back
to our render tab. And then under foam, we want to set this
to transparent so that we don't see our
HDRI in the background. Now, let's add some
materials to our Particles. Now select the Particle mesh, which is this cube
that we created. And then we're gonna go to
the shading tab at the top. Click on New to create
a new material. And let's just call
this particles. So now we can obviously
go in and we can change the color right here. But I wanna do something
a little different. I want to assign a bit of a random color to
all of these cubes, or at least three
different colors, but I want to assign them
randomly to our Particles. Now an easy way to do
that is to press Shift a and then click Search
and then type object. And we're going to select
this object info node, place it here, and
then we're going to create a color ramp node. So press Shift a search and type in color and then
select Color Ramp. You can place that
node right here. Now we can connect the random
from the object info into the factor of our color ramp and then the color into
our base color. Now already you can see
something is happening. We're getting this gradient
between white and black. And that's because we have
this color ramp and we can actually adjust these
colors right here. So what I wanna do is
I want to change this from linear to constant. So it's kinda not fading
between these colors, but then we can add
multiple colors and it will use either of those
three colors. So press the little plus
here to create a new color. And I'm simply going to just
drag these sliders around, click on this second one, then you can set the
color you at the bottom. So I'm going to set the
second one to a gray color, maybe like 50% gray. And then this color
you on the side, I'm going to set
to a lighter gray. Maybe something like that. You can obviously go in here and adjust some of these colors just so that we get these
three colors in our scene. So that's looking pretty cool. And now let's go back
to the layout and let's change over to render view
so we can see our Particles. And then let's go to
our Particles settings. And then under emission, let's increase the number of
parent Particles to 2000s. Alright, I think that
looks pretty cool. And then we can also
give a material to our base object to the
actual building itself. So an outline, I'm going
to select the Bolding. Then I'm going to go
to Shading and then click New to create
a new material. Let's call this bolding. Now for the building, I'm simply going to just give a base color. So just a kinda dark
gray base color. We can maybe add some metallic
value to that as well, and then maybe bring down
the roughness just slightly. What I also wanna do is our Make some of these Particles
a little darker. So if we click the Particle
year in the outliner, I just want to change some
of these colors around. So this lighter gray, I'm just going to bring
down a little darker, maybe some way here. And in this middle gray, I want to bring
down even further. So it's maybe
something like that. Alright, let's save
our project now. And now I can go back
to your Particles and under the render section, you can play with the size or the scale of these Particles. Maybe let's make them slightly smaller and see how that looks. Yeah, So as you can see, that is looking pretty nice. Now, if we zoom in here,
you can see that we have all of these cubes and everything
is looking really nice. But what we can do now is
we can actually go and just add some details to
our Particle cube. All of those details will be
transferred to our building. So let's switch back to Solid View and with our
cube objects selected, press Tab to go into Edit Mode. Then press 32, go into face select mode and select
all the faces by pressing a. Now let's create some insects. So press I twice on your keyboard so that you
get something like this. Can I just pull this in? And then with these
faces selected, press Alt or Option E, if you're on a Mac and then choose extrude faces
along normals. Now you can just
kinda pull them in, don't pull them to four, maybe something like that. And then just click
to accept that. So now we've created
some extra details on our queue particle. And I can press Tab to
go back to object mode. Now, if we look at our building, you can see we have all these extra details because we added
that to our cube. We can maybe increase the
number of children particles. As you can see, we have
some open spaces here. So let's select this building and go to a Particles settings. And let's go to the
children's section, and let's just
increase this to 20. Some setting the
display amount and the render amount of 20 so that we can see what
we're gonna get. Final render.
Alright, let's switch over to render view
and see what we have. Alright, so as you can see,
it's really easy to add some interesting details
to your measures are to your buildings
Using Hair Particles. Go ahead and play around and see what interesting
details you can create, save your project
once you're done. And I'll see you in
the next lesson.
15. Lesson 14: Final Project - Product Packshot With Swirling Flower Particles: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're
going to take a look at everything that we've learned
throughout this course. And we're going to create
our final project, which will be a Product
Packshot With some spiraling flower particles
going around it. So as you can see, I've
got a brand new project. So let's start by
deleting everything in the scene by pressing a
aches and clicking Delete. So I've already created a product that we can
use in this scene. So you can simply append it
from the Assets provided. So click on File and
then append and then browse to the Assets and find
the bottle dot blend file. Double-click on that, and
then double-click on Objects, and then select the bottle
mesh and click Append. So as you can see, it's
just a very simple product that I modeled that we're going to use in the scene
and it should import into the
center of your scene. Next, let's create
our Particle objects that we will use to spiral
around our product. And for that we simply going
to use a plain press Shift, a mesh and plane. And let's just move it off
to the side by pressing G X. Let's scale this
plane down slightly, so set the dimensions to 0.6. By 0.6. We can always adjust
the size, but for now, let's set it to 0.6 by 0.6. And then with this
plane selected press Control a to apply the scale. So now I can see the
scale is set to 111. You can press N to
hide that side menu. And let's add our Flower
material to this plane. The plane selected go
to the shading tab. And let's just create our first flower
particle material by clicking the New button here. And let's call this flower one. So now we can create
an image texture. So press Shift a and in search and just type
image and select the image texture from
the drop-down and just place that node
anywhere in this area. So now you can click on
Open and then browse to the flowers folder in the Assets provided and select the
Flower one dot PNG. Click Open image
to load that in. And now you can simply connect the color to the base color. As you can see, the flower
texture appears on this plane, but there's still a few
things we need to do. As you can see, it's not
transparent on the edges. Let's create our mapping node
so we can move it around. So press Shift a search and type mapping and place
that node right here, and then you can connect
a vector to the vector. Next, we also need a
texture coordinate node. So press Shift a
search and just type, see you and you'll see
texture coordinate. Let's place that right here. And now we can connect the
generated to the vector. So now we can use
this mapping node to adjust the location
of our texture. So just adjust these
values slightly until the flower is nice and
centered on this plane. Now on this image note, you can also change
this repeat to clip. And that will just
prevent the texture from tiling if you
move this around. Alright, so the next
thing we can do is connect the Alpha from our image texture node into the alpha of our
principled be STF. I can see this. We'll just kinda turn
black in the viewport. But if we switch over to
the cycles render engine, we should be able to
see that transparency. So let's go to our Render
Settings here on the side and change our render
engine two cycles. I'm going to choose
my GPU device. And now we can change over to the render display by clicking this icon here
and the top corner. Now you can see everything
around our flower is actually transparent and
that's exactly what we want. Next, let's bring down the specular and also
increase the roughness. You can play with this,
but I prefer to have less specular and also make it more rough says not
reflecting as much. And then another thing we
can do is we can connect the color to the emission. So if I zoom in
here, you can see our color goes into
this emission section. That will just create
a nice bright image that won't be affected by
any lights or shadows. Okay, let's rename this plane in the outliner to Flower one. And let's duplicate
this to create our second flower particle. So press shift D and then just press X and kinda
just move it on the x-axis. So it's sitting next
to our first flower. Now we need to create a new
material for this particle, but we can actually duplicate this material and just
change our texture. So to do that, you can
click on this little two right next to Flower one, and that will just create
a new duplicate material. Now I can see the name
changed to Flower one.001. So let's just change
this to Flower two. Now, if we zoom into
this image texture node, let's just reload
a different PNG. I'm going to click on the little folder and then I'm going to choose flower to
unclick open image. Now you can see it's
being cut off slightly. So we can go to the
mapping node holding Shift and just make some
adjustments to these values, that X and Y value to just center our flower
onto that plane. So you can go ahead and add another particle if you want to. But I'm just going
to do two for now. In the outliner. Let's rename the second
one to flower to a. Now we can go back to
the layout section. Alright, so what we can
do now is we can add both of these planes into
their own collection. So make sure you
select both of them. Press M on the keyboard, New Collection, and
let's call this flowers. We will use this collection
in our particle system. Next, what I wanna do is a spiral curve
around this product. So we can use that to control the way our particles will flow. Now, to do that, I use a little add on that
comes with Blender. So all you have to do is go
to Edit and Preferences, and then go to the
add-on section. Then we have the search bar. You can simply type in Curve. And then you will see an add-on called add Curve extra objects. So simply tick this
add-on to add it, and then click on these
three lines at the bottom, and then click Save Preferences. So this will give you some extra Curve options to work with. So let's close this down
and let's create our Curve. So in the viewport, press Shift a finger a Curve. And now you will see
all these extra options here that we've added
via that add-on. So we're gonna go
to curve spirals, and then we're going to
add a logarithmic curve. You'll see something like
this in the viewport. And now we can expand
this little drop-down or this menu on the site to get
to all of these parameters. So first of all, let's
increase the height just by changing this
value right here. And then we can also increase
the amount of turns. Maybe let's set that to
three and then bring the height down again,
something like that. And then we can also
set the radius here. Maybe look at this from the
top and just ensure that the radius is just
bigger than our product. And maybe something like that. We can maybe extend the height slightly
because we will probably move this curve down
so our particles will start kinda
underneath our product. So just increase the
height until you have maybe something that
looks like that. You can also
increase or decrease the steps just to
smooth out this curve. So I'm going to set
my steps to 64. Alright, so now we
can click anywhere in the viewport to create that spiral and just press Tab
to go back to object mode. Now with our Curve objects
selected, let's move it down. So press G and Z, you can just move
it down so that we are looking at the
center of the spiral. So our Particles will begin here at the bottom
and it will go around the spiral and kinda just go off-screen at the top. You can also scale the curve if you want to make
some more adjustments just by pressing S and maybe x0 to scale it in the z-axis, or you can scale it
on X and Y as well. I'm going to scale it
slightly on the Z. So I'm pressing Z and kinda just pulling it
out a little bit further. And then we can move
it slightly down again until we have
something like that. Okay, let's go ahead
and save our project. Now we can create
our Particle Emitter that will be imitating
the Flower Particles. For that we simply
going to use a plane. So I'm going to press
Shift a mesh and plane. Now, let's move this plane
down by pressing G and Z, and you can just move it down. So it's close to this
beginning point of our spiral. So I'm just going to move
it over to that side. So G and X, just to move it over Selim, the middle of our
plane should be quite close to that starting
point of the curve. Doesn't have to be perfect, just kinda get it close. We can maybe even move it down slightly so the
particles will have some time to be emitted
and then follow the curve. Let's make this Particle
Emitter slightly smaller. So I'm going to press
N on the keyboard to bring up this side menu. And let's set the X and
Y dimensions to 1.3. Alright, so just slightly
smaller like that. And now we can also apply
the scale by pressing Control a and choosing scale. Alright, so let's press N
to hide that side menu. And with our Emitter selected, let's go to the Particles tab here on the right-hand side. Now let's click the Plus button to add our particle system. You can rename it. So I'm just going to
double-click and call it flowers like that. And let's change some
of these parameters. So let's bring down the
number of particles to 200, and let's increase
the lifetime to 250. Now if we play this back, you'll see our Particles
will just simply fall down because we
have gravity enabled. So I'm gonna go back
to the first frame and then under our
Particles settings go all the way down to field weights and set
the gravity to zero. Alright, so now if
I play this back, you will see that our Particles
will simply just move up And that's because we don't have any gravity and we've got some velocity in
that z-direction. Now under our
Particles settings, Let's go to velocity, and let's set this all
to zero as we don't want any starting velocity on
these flower particles. We can maybe add some
slight randomization just by increasing this randomized value
here at the bottom. So I'm going to set mine to 0.2. Let's see how that looks like. You can see now our
particles are kind of just moving out into space. So before we forget, let's add some random
rotation to our Particles. So I'm going to tick
the box next to rotation and just expand that. And then I'm going to set the
phase 21 and I'm going to increase the randomized
phase all the way to two. We can also take
this dynamic box to add some dynamic rotation. Now if we play this back, we won't really see any
difference because we are using these little halo Particles and we can't see them rotating. So let's go to the render section under
our Particle System. And instead of renders halo, let's change this to collection. And then we're going to choose our flower collection year next to the instance collection. Now if we play this back, you'll see we have
some tiny plane Particles that's coming
out of our Emitter, but they're really small. So let's increase the scale to 1.5 and set the
randomness to one. Okay, so let's play that back. I can see our flower
particles are kinda just floating
around in space. If we change over
to the render view, you can see all the
pretty flowers. Alright, so the next
step will be 0s to get our Particles to follow
this curve Objects. Now, before we add, are forced to our Curve Objects. Let's press N to bring
up the side menu. And let's quickly
see if we need to apply the scale of this curve. So if I select this curve, we can see the scale is 11 and then it's got
a weird number here. So that tells me I need to
apply the scale of this curve. So press Control a and
then select scale. And now it's,
everything is said to 111, which is perfect. So now we can press
N to close down that menu and with
our Curve selected, let's go to the Physics tab
here on the right-hand side. Click force-field. So as you can see, it created this force here in the center. And what we wanna do
is we want to change the shape from point to Curve. And this means it's
actually going to use the Curve object as our force. Now, if we play this back, you'll see our
Particles will just fall down and go into
some weird direction. And that's because our force or our Curve force has
got a strength of one, which is a positive
strength number. So we're going to
bring this down all the way to negative 25. And that means our curve
will attract our Particles. Let's play that back
and see what we get. So as you can see, that's
looking pretty cool, but it feels like the
particles are flying all over the place and they're not really following the curve too closely. So we can fix that by
adjusting this flow value. So let's increase this
flow value to 0.6, and let's try that again. Now you can see
our particles are closely following
our Curve object, which is exactly what we want. At the end you can
see they can go all crazy because once
they exit the curve, they don't really know
where to go and they just get attracted by the curve
again and they fall backwards. But we're going
to fix that soon. So what do we wanna do
is we want to create an object that
will actually kill our Particles once they reach the end of
this Curve object. So let's create a
plane for that. Shift a mesh and in plane, Let's move it upwards. So G and Z, Let's scale it up by pressing as you can make this pretty big. And then we're gonna
just kinda move it down. So it's just sitting
above the curve. So you can see the
curve is kinda sticking through this plane. Gz just kinda moving it up, so it's just above that Curve. Now, let's apply the
scale of this plane. So Control a and scale. And then on the physics tab, Let's click Collision to make this plane a
Collision Objects. And then all we
have to do is take this kill Particles button. And that means any
particle that comes into contact with this
plane will be deleted. Basically, it will
just disappear. Let's see if it works. So if I play this back, you can see our particles are streaming that way and as
they get to the plane, they should simply disappear. Yeah, that's basically once the pivot of that particle
gets to the plane, then it will be deleted That's just to prevent them
from falling back down. Now, let's create a camera so we can set up our composition. So press Shift a and
then choose camera. And I'm simply just going
to move it backwards. So press G and Y and just move the camera
back on the y-axis. So you can see our camera is oriented slightly off center. The camera selected press
N to open the side menu. And let's set the
X rotation to 90, set the Y to zero, and the Z also to zero. So now you can see our camera is pointing directly
forward to our product. Let's move the camera up
slightly by pressing G and Z, just so it's not on the floor. Now let's look through
the camera and press N to hide this side menu. And I can see that is what
we see through the camera. So let's move the camera up slightly and maybe
let's just tilted down. So press R and then X
and just tilt it so it's looking more kinda
something like that. The thing is we
don't want to see this plane here at the top. So just make sure
that's not in the shot. With a camera selected, we can maybe move it
back by pressing G and Y and just sliding
it around like this. We can maybe move the
camera up slightly. And I was thinking maybe to add a camera animation just
of the camera kinda starting of clothes and just slowly moving back,
revealing our scene. So let's go all the
way to frame 250. And then I'm going to set
a keyframe on the camera. The camera selected
press I and location. Now let's go back
to the first frame. So I'm pressing Shift. Left Arrow can just use a timeline to go
back to frame one. And then with the
cameras still selected, press G and just move it
closer to our product. We can maybe move
it slightly down. So I'm going to press G and Z, just kinda moving it so
it's something like that. Now press I and location to add a location
keyframe on the camera. Now let's play this back
and see what we get. Okay, so that's
looking pretty cool. Just one thing I wanna do is these two keyframes that
we added on the camera, actually using a Bezier curve. So it's kinda starting
off slow and then speeding up and then slowing
down at the end again. So to fix that, just hover your
mouse pointer over the timeline area right here. Press a to select
both keyframes, right-click and then goto interpolation
mode and choose linear. So linear, we'll just give us a constant move so it won't
speed up and slow down. So just choose a linear. Now if we press Space, you can see that our camera
move is a lot more constant. So as you will see once I
start playing this animation, it takes a while
before we can actually see our first Particle. You can see we only see it
around frame 50 or frame 60, then they come into frame. So let's adjust
our starting frame of our particle simulation. So let's select our
Emitter in the scene. We can actually just
rename this Emitter. I see it's still plane
in the outliner, so I'm simply just going
to rename that to Emitter. So with our Emitter selected, let's go to the
emission section. You're on the right-hand side. And here you can see we have our frame start
and our frame end. This is where our Emitter, we'll start emitting
particles at frame one, and then it will end emitting
particles at time 200. I want to bring that
down even further and we can actually use a negative
frame number here. So I'm going to set the frame, start to frame negative 70. And then I'm going to change
the end frame to frame 50. So this means it's
going to start emitting particles at Frame negative 70, and it's going to end the
meeting Particles at frame 50. Let's see what we get. Some I can see on frame one, we can actually
see our Particles. So maybe we need to dial
this in slightly better. So let's change the
frame start to -40. So let's also set the end frame to frame it and let's
see how that looks. So to refresh your
Particle System, just change the number of particles and let's just
change it back to 200. And that should kinda just
reset our Particle System. Remember to save often, and let's press Space
to preview that. Alright, so once you are happy with your Particle Simulation, Let's bake our particle
simulation to cash. So under the Particles
settings go down to cash and then simply
click on bake Now if you play this back,
you'll see that our Particles will begin a lot closer
to the animation. You can see them
swirling around and then hopefully they should
all go out of frame. If you're particles are not
really following the curve, you can always go
into that Curve, force and increase the
flow value right here. Just remember to rebate
your Particle Simulation. Another thing that you can do
is you can maybe bring down the skill plane that's killing
the Particles at the end. So you can maybe bring
it down if it's not really working too well. The role depends on how
the particles will move. So if you need to adjust it, just move it down slightly and then rebate the Particle System. So let's look through the
camera and see what we have. Let's pause it right here. And let's change
over to render view. So as you can see,
the particles are now spiraling nicely
around our product. So let's add some nicer
lighting to our scene. So let's go to the
world settings and then click this
little dot next to color. And then we're going to
choose environment texture to load an HDRI. Click on Open, and
then browse to your HDRI folder and
use anyone you want. I'm going to choose a little forest scene,
maybe this one. Let's see how that works. Now what we wanna do is we
want to go to the render tab, go down to foam, and then just click
this transparent so we don't see the HDRI background. Another thing under
render settings, if we go all the way down
to color management, let's change our
view transform to standard just to get a
little bit more contrast. So let's look through our camera to just see
our shot once more. And let's just do a quick playback urine
render view just to get an idea of what we get next, what I wanna do is I want
to add some depth of field. So let's select our camera. Go to our camera settings
here on the right-hand side. And let's tick this box
next to depth of field. Now for the focus objects, I'm going to use our product. So simply click on the
eyedropper and then just choose the bottle object as
your focus objects. You can obviously manually
adjust this if you want to, but for this shot,
it should work fine. Now we can also adjust
the f-stop number here. We can bring this down to
maybe one to just add more of a blur effect for the objects closer and
further away from the camera. So we can even bring this
down further, maybe 0.4. If you want more blur in the
Particles closeted camera, you can adjust this
and see what you like. Now, let's go to our world
settings and increase the brightness of our HDRI as it does feel a
little bit dark to me. So I'm going to increase
the strength here to, to, just to get a little bit
more light into the scene. Now let's go back
to the first frame. And what we can also do is
before we start our render, if we go to our render settings, we can enable motion
blur right here. Now this will just give
us a nice motion blur for those flower particles. So I would suggest you enable
motion blur right here. Now let's have a look
at our render settings. So expand sampling. And under render, this
is where we're going to set our maximum render samples. And for this
something like 256 or maybe five-twelfths should
be more than enough. And then I also want
to de-noise this. So I'm going to take
that and then I also want to increase
my light bounces. So you next two light paths, you can simply click on
this little drop-down menu and then select full
global illumination. Now remember we don't have
any background in our scene. So if we're going
to render this, we will basically just get
the bottle product and our Particles on a
transparent background. Then you can use your
editing software or your compositor of choice to add a
background into the shot. So you can either
go ahead and add your background inside
of Blender to have an actual plane that can cost some shadows
and reflections. Or you can simply render
this as its own layer and then add your own
background later on. So that's what we're gonna do. I'm going to look through
the camera and I think we are ready to
start our render. Let's just play through
this one more time to kinda just see if
everything is picking. Okay? Also preview this in real time just by
going into solid mode. And you can see, we can just see the movement of the
Particles a bit better. Let's look at our
output settings. So click on the
little Output tab here on the right-hand side. And at the top you can see the dimensions are
the resolution. So for this, we simply
going to go with one in 20 by 1 h at. And then we're going to
scroll down to output. You can choose a
folder where you want to render
your animation to. So you can simply click
on this folder and then browse to a folder
on your computer. And let's give this a name. So I'm gonna call this
product Animation. And then I'm going to
place an underscore. Now the reason I'm adding an underscore is because
we're going to render an image sequence and it's going to add the frame
number like 010203, just off to the word
Product Animation. So that's kinda just to
keep it nice and neat. Then click on Accept, and now we can choose
our file format. So for this render, I'm
simply going to go for a PNG, but feel free to use a open the XOR multi-layer if you more familiar with that format. So somebody going to select PNG and then make
sure you select RGBA so that we get that transparency or that
Alpha channel with our PNG, make sure your frame
range is correct. So we're going to
render from frame one all the way to frame 250. That is perfect. And once you are ready,
save your project, and then simply
click on render yet the top and then
render Animation. Now, this will start
rendering your Animation. And as you can see
it, we'll go through all those samples and it will save all those PNG files in
the folder you specified. Then you can make use of your favorite
compositing application. We can even composited
year inside of Blender. So let us run through, remember to save your project. And I will see you
in the next lesson.
16. Course Conclusion: Thank You For Enrolling: And we've come to the end of this Blender Particles
Masterclass. I really hope that you enjoyed this course and that
you've learned a lot. Feel free to share
your final project renders with me so I
can give you feedback. Also, please let me
know if you have any questions as I
will gladly assist, kindly rate and review
this course as it really helps me to create more
courses just like this one. All the best with your Blender
journey ahead and have FUN creating amazing
particle simulations. Thank you and goodbye
Ruan Lotter, VFX & 3D Artist
