- Hello and welcome.
My name is John Dickinson for Boris FX
and in this Particle Illusion tutorial,
we're going to create a realistic floating dust simulation
using just a basic emitter as a starting point.
So let's get started.
(electronic music)
Although Particle Illusion ships
with countless presets that you can use
as a starting point, if you're doing anything
more than minor adjustments,
things can get quite confusing quite quickly.
So sometimes there's gonna be cases
when it's easier to work out what's going on
if you start from a basic emitter.
So let's do that, we'll start by adding a basic emitter.
I'm just gonna search for "basic"
and double click "Basic Emitter,"
which is the most basic emitter in Particle Illusion.
And I just wanna come up to the View menu
and choose Load Layout Edit, hit the Home key
to move the time indicator back to the beginning,
press the space bar to play that back,
and we have this teeny weeny emitter.
And this is much easier to build upon
because I'm not trying to dig down into this Emitter
and into the particles to work out
what's changed from its default settings,
are there any key frames,
before I can create my adjustments to create my look.
So the first thing we're gonna do is come up to Properties,
and we're gonna change the Shape from Point to Area.
That's a really small area.
I want to make it the size of the stage,
so this is 1920 x 1080.
Just zoom out there, press the space bar.
Okay, so now we have the Area Emitter
and that's filling the viewable area.
Let's just twirl up Properties for now,
come down to New Particle Type.
I'm actually gonna rename this.
Rename, I'm gonna call this "Dust."
We wanna check the shape that's being used.
Okay, so I think Basic Blur is gonna be fine for this
so I'll leave it like that,
come down to Colors and we're gonna use a gradient,
so click on the color swatch,
pick to add a couple more stops.
Let's see, I want to do something like that
for the first one.
And maybe a pale blue for the last one.
Something like that.
I don't really want white in the middle, probably just gray.
So I'll just bring that down a little bit.
So I'm using the gradient as kind of a lighting
where we've got some incandescent light
and we've also got some sunlight
maybe shining through a window.
We can come back and adjust that later if need be.
Next let's adjust the Alpha.
And I'm going to add another stop at the end,
one here and one here.
Change this one to black.
And change the end one to black.
Because I want these to kind of fade in and then fade out,
almost as if they're moving into the light.
Okay.
Pull up Properties, we'll change Life to 100.
Size to one, needs to be really small.
Size Variation to five.
Now we can see a few of them.
Let's see, increase the Velocity to about 25,
give them a little bit of movement
and Number we'll bring down to one.
We don't want it quite so dusty.
Ah, looking good.
Okay so we're starting to get
more of a floating dust-like appearance.
So you can press the Home key,
when I do that you can see we don't see any particles.
So we'll come up to the Emitter
and we'll just increase the Frames to Preload.
Bring that to 500.
Looking good.
So next thing to do is use a force.
You want to push these particles across the frame.
I'm gonna click on Force, click in the stage.
Twirl up Dust and change the Force Type from Area to Grid.
Now we also want this to be 1920 x 1080.
And we want the Position to be 0,0.
So that fills the viewable area as well.
That's pushing them across fairly fast,
it's a little bit difficult to see.
Looks like they're kind of underwater.
Strength is way too high, I'm gonna bring that down to 25.
That's looking better.
And let's change the Direction Variation.
Make that 100.
Ah that's looking great, isn't it?
I love the Grid.
Getting really natural movement to those particles now.
Really feels like they're being moved around by the air.
Let's increase the Strength Variation as well.
Looking good.
I might just increase the Opacity for the Emitter,
change that from 50 to 100.
We'll probably still have too many particles
so we're just going to open up Dust again.
And change this to 0.5.
You can go below one.
Maybe even more, let's go 0.25.
Now that's looking good,
so now let's add a little bit of depth to this
by duplicating the particle
and changing that duplicate particle's size and the number.
We'll come to Dust and I'll Duplicate Particle Type.
We can change this front one.
Just rename this.
This too.
Then we'll change the Shape Image.
I'm going to choose from Emitters_2020.5 tracer.
You want this to be kind of like a bokeh feel,
like these are out of focus.
Now at the moment they're sitting right on top
of the other particles,
so I'll change the Motion Randomness to about 50.
And the Number right down to 0.10,
we only want a few of these.
We'll also need to change the Size
and maybe the Size Variation.
Let's see, there's still a few too many.
Make that 10.
Bring the Opacity down.
We'll make it a little bigger.
Let's see, let's adjust the Size Variation.
Maybe 15 and that number is still too high.
I've got 0.1, I want 0.01.
Ah, that's much better.
I think the Opacity is still too high for those,
going to make that 25.
And also increase the Size Variation.
Ah, looking good.
So we don't want too many of those foreground particles,
just a couple.
So most of the hard work is done using that Grid Force.
Okay, so let's call that done.
Come up to the hamburger menu for the Emitter
and choose Save to Emitter Library.
Give it a name, maybe "Drifting Dust,"
I'm gonna say two because I've already saved one of these.
I'm not gonna enter any search tags
and I'm going to place that into my own custom library.
And if you want to see how to create a custom library
just check out the Understanding Presets Tutorial.
Just change back to my default
and do a search for "dust"
or maybe "drifting dust"
and there we are, there's my preset.
And you may notice that you can't actually see
the force in this preview,
and that's because currently forces
and deflectors aren't saved with the preview,
so something to keep in mind.
Okay, so that definitely would have been more difficult
if I'd started with a more complicated preset,
so definitely consider using a base emitter
with base line settings as a starting point
when you are creating your own custom looks.
You can download Particle Illusion standalone
for free at borisfx.com,
including thousands of free particle emitter presets.
Continue watching this Getting Started Tutorial Series
to learn more about what you can do with Particle Illusion
and find out more about the plug-in version
of Particle Illusion with extra features,
including built-in Mocha Motion Tracking at borisfx.com.