- Welcome back to getting started with particle illusion.
In this tutorial,
we're gonna take a look at
the fantastic fluid dynamics feature
introduced in particle illusion 2022.
(graphic blipping)
Fluid dynamics is a simulation of the way gases and liquids
flow and swirl as they move.
And it enables you to add this kind of natural
fluid like motion to your particle simulations.
So I've gone ahead and set up a scene
where we have an emitter
just shooting a burst of particles out.
And fluid dynamics are a property of force objects.
So we have to start by adding a force object to the stage
just by clicking on the force button up here at the top,
and only the particles within the force area are affected.
So I'm just going to change the size of this
just to encompass the entire stage.
And if we just play this back,
you're not gonna see anything
other than the particles being pushed to the right,
because fluid dynamics hasn't been enabled yet.
And we have a strength of 100
and the arrow is pointing to the right by default.
So what we have to do to create the fluid force
is come over to the left here
and click enable fluid dynamics.
And you can instantly see the difference.
Let's play that back.
So when the particles enter the force area,
they become part of the simulation.
If we set strength to zero for the force,
let's just play this back.
The simulation is only using the initial velocity
of the particles.
So everything's moving a little more slowly.
So the fluid motion comes from the particle's own velocity
or weight, and also by the action of the forces
on the particles, including the fluids force object.
And something to mention is that you can only have
one fluids force object.
So if you've got multiple forces on your stage,
you can only allocate one of them
as the fluid dynamics force.
So only particles that are within the force area
are affected.
So if we make this a little smaller watch what happens,
especially with this high strength.
Particles on this side, won't be effected
and particles will get pushed through,
and as they exit the force, they'll no longer be affected.
So you get a fairly obvious delineation
between the particles inside
affected by the fluid and the particles outside.
I'm just going to change that back to
encompass the entire stage,
and the force type can also the look of the simulation.
So we've got a standard force here, standard box force.
What happens if we change this to a box grid?
At the moment,
all of the areas are pointing in the same direction,
but if we change the direction variation,
let's crank that up.
You can see it's already changing that simulation.
And if we change the strength,
that's gonna push particles in different directions
and give you a different look.
We also have this sphere type.
I'm gonna make that a little larger.
And at its default settings,
the sphere type force attracts particles towards the center.
Let's really crank up this strength.
Now this is obviously a strong directional emitter,
but you can see how some of the particles
are being drawn backwards,
and the sphere force could be really good for these kind of
down the drain looks.
So play around with the different force types
and different strength values to give you different looks.
I'm just gonna bring this back to a box
and just take my strengths back to 100.
And let's take a look at the fluid parameters.
Now we only have three parameters,
viscosity, swirling and simulation detail.
And let's look at simulation detail first,
because this is probably
the setting that changes the look of the particles
most dramatically.
16 is the default setting.
And 16 is faster to calculate, but gives you less detail.
It gives you more of these big sweeping looks.
32 is a little bit more render intensive,
but it's a good compromise between detail and speed.
And it's probably the one you'll use most of the time.
And 64 is the highest detail option,
but it's the slowest to calculate.
Now you can see, we have even more detail in there.
Let's just bring this back to 16 for now
and talk about swirling.
Now, swirling adds interference into the flow,
and it's more important with these kind of single
emitter scenes with no other emitters or forces
to introduce any swirling.
The default is 30.
And generally you'll probably leave it at this setting
most of the time.
Let's take this down to zero.
You can say basically, other than this fan at the front,
really not much is happening to that simulation.
Let's double it to 60.
Now we get really obvious swirling.
Now viscosity controls the thickness of the fluid.
So a setting of one would be more like water.
And if we crank this up, let's make this ten.
You can see how the particles are having more of a struggle
to push through the liquid.
So this will be more like oil.
So the look of your simulation will depend on
the combination of these three parameters,
and the forces that you have in the scene
and their settings.
And also how many emitters you have in the scene.
Let's bring viscosity back to one
and we'll take swirling back to 30.
I'm gonna come down and just enable this other emitter,
despite choosing enabled from the hamburger menu.
And just play that one back.
So because the fluid simulation is controlled
by the force object, adding emitters together,
combines their motion automatically.
I might just increase the velocity of that one.
Very nice, Let's just also come back
and we'll just increase the simulation detail.
You can see how responsive particle illusion is
in this 2022 version.
Very nice.
Now, when you are using multiple emitters,
we just come back and click on the second one here.
You'll notice that under the emitter settings
there's a new effect fluids parameter.
So if we increase the green one to 200,
you can see that now has more influence in the simulation
and starts to push the emitter back.
So you can fine tune how much influence each emitter has
over the particle simulation
by adjusting the effect fluid setting.
Something else to note is that fluid dynamics
also works in 2D.
Please switch this across to 2D.
It has a flatter appearance.
What I'm gonna do is just bring this back to 100.
It has a flatter appearance, but it also renders faster.
And if you click on the fluid force,
notice under simulation detail, we don't have 16,
we start at 32 and we go all the way up to 256.
So you can have more detail in your simulation
and that's obviously I wanna change that to 256.
So if you don't need 3D and you'd like to have more detail
then maybe 2D instead.
Very nice.
Now, before we finish,
I just want to mention another great new feature introduced
in particle illusion 2022 and that's library scenes.
I'm just gonna come up and choose new project.
And also just change this to load layout create.
And notice down here in the preset list,
we have emitters 2022,
and underneath that there's these new emitters
with a plus sign.
These are actually full particle illusions scenes,
which contain multiple emitters and forces already set up.
These were expertly created by Anna Lawrence
and I'll give you a great idea
about the kinds of things that you can do
with the new fluid dynamics feature.
So thanks for watching.
Remember, you can download
particle illusions standalone for free,
which includes thousands of free particle emitter presets
at borisfx.com,
where you can also learn more about the plug-in version
of particle illusion,
with features including built-in Mocha motion tracking
after effects light, and 3D layer tracking
and emitters on text and masks all at borisfx.com.