- The lines feature was introduced
in Particle Illusion 2021,
and adds some great new creative possibilities.
So in this tutorial,
we'll take a look at those new lines features
and how you can use them to add some spice
to your particle simulations.
(uptempo music)
Now, lines look particularly good
when you use an emitter that has turbulence.
So I'm gonna use one of the emitted 2021.5 presets.
This one here, Nebula 2.
Double click that,
and this is a box shape, one of the new 3D emitters.
It also has some position turbulence and size turbulence.
Okay, so that's our starting point.
Applying lines is super simple.
We just come down and click the particle node
to open properties and to open lines.
At the top, we have three connect options
and we have a thickness, line color,
line opacity and opacity.
Let's start with connect to emitter.
Just turn that on.
And what this is doing is adding a line
between each particle and the admitted reference point.
And this is obviously way too much.
When you're working with lines,
you really have to come in and adjust thickness
and opacity to zero in on just the right look,
depending on how many particles you have.
So I'm gonna drop opacity right down to say, five.
That still might be a little bit too much.
Maybe make that three.
Okay, that's looking a little better.
You can see how that really makes
that turbulent emitter shine and this is also a 3D emitter,
so if we've got a top view,
you see that lines also work in 3D.
Now, currently line opacity is set to scale particle alpha.
And if we twell open alpha,
you can see this particular emitter has an alpha
that starts black, goes to white and goes to black.
So this starts transparent,
goes fully opaque and then fades back to transparency.
So by using scale particle alpha,
the lines are also scaling this way.
And that's my preferred way to set up my line opacity,
because if I've set up an alpha for my particles,
then I definitely want my lines to fade in
and fade out in the same way.
If you chose line opacity specify
then you can choose a particular opacity,
but just keep in mind that when particles are born,
the lines will pop on, and when particles die,
the lines will pop off,
irrespective of what you've got set up here in your alpha.
Brings it back to scale particle alpha.
The next connect two option is birth position
and keep in mind also that we can have all three
of these on at the same time, but it can get a bit wild.
So connect to birth position adds a line
between the particle and its original birth position.
And you can see it's a little too transparent here,
let's make the capacity 10.
So this particular option works particularly well
with plane and box emitters, which is what I have here.
Let's do a quick preview.
You can get some really interesting looks.
What I like to do is drop my thickness,
bring that right down, and also bring the opacity up,
maybe double that.
But depending on the connect two option that you choose,
you'll want to adjust both the thickness and the opacity.
This gives us almost a hair-like style
and keep in mind also, that we can actually turn
the particles off completely by reducing the size to zero.
Just like that.
It's actually quite fun to apply one of the existing presets
and just turn on lines and turn the particle size to zero.
You can really get some interesting looks.
Gonna undo that.
Okay, so the third option is connect particles.
And at these settings, it really does make a bit of a mess.
But what this option gives you is a max line length.
So at the moment it's 9,000.
So particles that are born quite far apart
are getting a line.
So we need to decrease that quite dramatically.
We'll make that say, 500.
Now you can see that really reduces the amount of lines.
We can maybe increase the thickness slightly
and also increase the opacity.
That's probably a little too much, maybe 30.
That really does change the look quite dramatically.
And there's also a line color option.
At the moment, this is using the particle color
and this particular particle has a gradient.
Now, if you don't wanna use the particle color,
you can also choose specify.
Maybe I wanna make these a blue.
But I generally like to use the same color as the particle.
And once you've set up the look that you like,
what I like to do is change the shape of the emitter,
so this is set to box, what if we try sphere?
Now this is obviously a really huge sphere,
so I'll just bring that down to say, 500.
So it's quite fun to set up different looks
and then try different emitters and see what that gives you.
What if we increase the particle number here, make that 50.
Ah, interesting.
And as I mentioned, using turbulence really makes lines
look their best.
Let's try size at zero for this one as well.
And that gives us this kind of hairy sphere look.
And as for super emitters, they can also look fantastic
when used with the lines feature.
Here, I'm using one of the super sparkly emitter presets
and if we come in and turn on lines for the particle,
that is how there's an extra connect to.
This is the connect to main emitter
and that's because super emitters have the extra level
of detail, which is the free emitter.
So if I click on connect to main emitter
that connects each particle
to the main emitter reference point.
Let's just bring down the line opacity again,
maybe something like that.
And then turn on connect to emitter.
Take a look at that.
Now we have each particle connected to the main emitter
and also connected to the free emitter,
might just bring up the opacity just for a moment.
Now you can see them more clearly.
So we're getting this extra level,
which is really interesting.
You could also try activating connect to birth position,
and this adds even more detail.
Let's bring the opacity up just a little bit more.
And you can start to add a few too many lines.
I actually like, with these kinds of explosive emitters,
connect to birth position on by itself, take a look at this.
You can see how it really adds some form to this explosion.
And not only do the particles have the extra
connect to emitter property that connects the particles
to the free emitters,
free emitters also have a couple of lines controls.
So if we activate connect to emitter,
this is going to connect each free emitter
to the main emitter reference point,
and you can see those white lines.
Let's just increase the thickness just slightly
because these lines also have their own thickness,
color and opacity.
And there's also a connect free emitters option,
which is gonna give us a line
between each of the free emitters, just like that.
Almost like a spider web.
That's obviously way too thick now.
It might look better if it was more of a gold.
I don't think we need connect to emitter in this case.
Okay, so definitely some interesting options
when you're working with lines and super emitters.
So now that you're familiar with lines,
why not try them when you're creating your own simulations.
Also check out the presets.
There's a number of different presets that use lines
and see how they were created
and take a look at the continuum version
of Particle Illusion,
which I used to create these particular examples
that integrate the lines feature
with some of the after effects
specific Particle Illusion features.
Remember you can download Particle Illusions Standalone
for free, including thousands of free particle emitter
presets at borisfx.com,
and you can also learn more about the continuum plug-in
version of Particle Illusion,
including Mocha motion tracking, after effects light,
and 3D layer tracking and emitters on texts and masks.
Once again, that's borisfx.com.