- [Casey] Alrighty yeah. Hey, so thanks for showing up to the booth. I know this
is day four of NAB and you guys have probably seen a lot of demos. I'm super
excited to have people here today. And everyone watching on the Internet, thanks
for showing up. Hello again, mom. And yeah, so on my first presentation on
Monday, we went over a bunch of stuff. And if you did see it, then you're going to be
jumping in at the midpoint of where we left off. If you didn't see it, it will be
in the archives and it won't be exactly, it's not required knowledge for you guys
to have to go about today's. Today's we're going to be going over the nodal shader
system, and Octane Render, and some Octane 3 features. I will warn you, I am showing
an alpha version of Octane 3, and if Cinema just crashes, don't be mad at
Cinema. Just be mad at some very early implementations of some features that
we're going to be going over. We're also going to be doing a whole bunch of
X-Particles, and that's the stuff that I'm saving a little bit for the end because I
want to give the Octane section a little bit more time to breathe, and I have some
TurbulenceFD setup and process that I would like to go over as well. But yeah,
my name's Casey Hupke. I'm a freelancer out of Los Angeles, and I couldn't be
happier to be here. There's been an insane roster this year, and I'm very, very
humbled to be considered on par with those fellows and ladies. So yeah, also thanks
again Aaron for my new branding. I will go ahead and show you guys my reel.
- That's my latest reel. Thanks Adam at spiffy.la for cutting that for me. So
let's just go in and start with some texturing. One of the things that I was
toting during the last presentation was how great NitroBlast and its fracturing
system works in conjunction with maintaining UV relationships between what
was once a parametric sphere with spherical projected textures, and what is
now an object that is hundreds, if not sometimes thousands, of pieces, and how it
does a very good job at keeping their UVs for their internal materials and external
materials. So what I want to do is I want to make the material for our planet.
Here's what the end result of our planet material sort of ends up looking like. We
have this really cracky, diffuse, mixtured surface. It's hard to see all the
different layers that are going into what's driving the different height values
for the depth, and the bump, and the displacement in this shader itself. So
what I'm going to be doing is using some solid colors so along the way you can see
that we come up with this material, but when we fracture it into something that
looks like this, it stays the same. And let's go ahead and start inside a...let's
grab this sphere. No let's go ahead and open up a new scene file. I'm going to
paste in that sphere that we just made because it's the scale that I want to work
at already. And let's go ahead and let's just delete these materials and then start
these materials all from scratch. So I'm going to open up a couple things just to
set up our scene to work well and responsive with the Octane node graph.
Let's open up Octane settings, and let's change our kernel from direct lighting to
path tracing, so we can get not only access to our volume step length, which is
going to come in handy when we start doing smoke shading. But it's also just a more
robust kernel. By default, these settings, I don't even know what project these would
be appropriate for, but let's go ahead and also open up our
Live Viewer and let's go ahead and initialize that. And we're going to create
an object in a texture environment, just something to provide us light. I'm going
to select this tag right here and just turn the power down just a little bit. I
just want to show what we have as far as lighting of a scene for right now. And
then we are going to go into our settings section here. We got our GPUs on. I'm
going ahead and set one of these to use as priority. And what that's going to do is
set the priority of this GPU, which is currently driving our display, it's going
to let it breathe a little bit while Octane's eating everything it possibly
can. There's another setting thing that if you're using the node graph, this is going
to be something that you want to have one. I've already turned them on. By default,
it does not have auto load materials in node previews. And what that basically is
going to enable us to do is, if I open up the Octane Node Editor, I like to work
with it as docked right here on the side. If I create an Octane material right here,
you'll notice that it drops one down in here. But if I do something like this,
which is going to be something that we work with a lot in image texture, and
click these two tabs there. What I just did was ask Octane to give me a node graph
or two float value nodes for UV transform and projection. And it didn't create them
right there, but it says that they are there. One of the reasons why I didn't do
that is because I don't have auto load enabled. So if I go ahead and select this
material right here, now we can see that they're in there. So this will show you an
example of how we would hope it to work when we're working with it. Now that we
have auto update and auto load on, I'm going to collect my image texture, and I'm
going to hit UV Transform and UV Projection, and it should have linked them
all for me, but I think it didn't because I didn't have this guy selected down here.
Yeah, so it's just going to do nice stuff when it works. Notice at the top it does
say WIP and that we are riding the lightning with Alpha 3 right now. So what
can we do with this image texture? This image texture node is a vessel for us to
load an irrasterized image file. To create the surface of our object, I'm going to
use, I'm going to be chaining together a series of materials that will give us a
kind of interesting representation of a dead planet. So let's start by loading up
a bump map. The materials that I'm using are from a website called
realdisplacementtextures.com. It's a pack of super high res 4K and 8K channels. You
get everything from bump, to depth, to gloss, and they can all be translated into
working with Octane very easily, just as easy as... I say load bump. I see the bump
thumbnail load in and connected to the material. And now I have bump inside my
shader. Let me apply this shader to our sphere and let's go ahead and select the
material, go to the diffuse, and change the color to something. Let's go ahead and
update this. And in my transform, I'm going to change my aspect ratio, because
this is going to let me... I'm actually going to switch this to spherical as well,
because that's going to come in handy later. Let's let it reload, and then let's
play with our scale. Okay, let me get this loaded in here. It should be going
through. Not entirely sure why it's not reinitializing right there. But let's just
get all the images loaded up and then I'll open up the file that has the sphere
already textured. Actually, let's just go ahead and open up that one, and I'll walk
you through the node flow, and we'll fix it along the way if there's any issues
with it. So we already have the file open with our planet and materials loaded. So
let's close this and oh, take our sphere into a new file. Soul (sp) it out. Let's
open up, close this. Let's open up our Live Viewer window. Let's open up our Node
Editor. And one of the things we're working with really heavily here in when
we want to mix to create a lot of different surfaces is the mix material
node. So let me grab my mix material node. Here's our cool planet. Oh man. Of course,
we've got it all broken. Got it all broken. Okay, so material one, you should
be this guy right here. Okay, there we go. So now let's auto load this one. That's
our mix material. Let me get active material, and let's make this big. For
some reason, it's referencing both of them. But we're going to unlink this one
and I'm going to show you the mix material workflow. We're going to mix the channels
using a noise map. So on our sphere, I'm going to take the mix material that we
have with nothing in it. The thumbnail image isn't loading up right now, but
let's just throw this on top here. Let's delete all of these except for our Phong.
Delete, delete, delete, throw our mix material up here. Let's delete that one
too, and go inside. Now we're going to make an Octane material and an Octane
material. And we're going to connect both of these into the material inputs. Let's
go full screen. And let's move these over here a little bit. Let's make this connect
right here, and this connect right here. And I just want to show you a simple use
of mixing two materials together, and once of the reasons why I really like using the
node graph to visualize what's going on. In our diffuse, I don't have to do this,
but I'm going to. I'm going to create an RGB spectrum node and connect it to our
diffuse channel. And I'm going to set this one to red or orange. And I'm going to set
this one to like a blue. And let's go ahead and reload our scene. We're going to
need an environment, so let's make a texture environment. So now we can see
that we have two materials, one is this orange, and one is this blue color. And
this noise, this Cinema 4D noise shader I've used is controlling the amount at
which they mix. But you're not limited of just doing two of these. So in the example
of the texture that I did before, I had a few different things going on. So let's go
ahead and change these both to a different type. Right now, they're currently set to
diffuse, so they have no glossiness, or roughness, or anything really going on
that's going to be interesting. So I changed these to glossy. We're start to
get some Fresnel environmental reflection going on, and some extra stuff to play
with. So now let me load image texture into our, let's just do bump, and let's go
ahead and path to our 4K bump. Say no, let it reload, and for some reason the image
texture node is not wanting to work for me. This may be just because of the build
I'm currently working on. So let's go ahead and visualize our bump map in this
shader with an Octane built-in noise, and crank the contrast and gamma. It's
probably also not showing up because of just the colors and the way that the scene
is lit right now. It's not really important. Mainly what I want to show you
guys is the process of linking and chaining together mix materials in a node
view so that you're coming up with complex shaders, you can do really cool stuff.
Like okay, we have our, let's call this our terrain or our land mass. And then we
want to mix it again, and we want to be able to have some water. So when I created
this mix material node up there in the object manager down here, or the texture
manager, we got another mix material. So I'm running this chain of mix materials,
and let's go ahead and replace this on our surface into here. Right now, it's just
set to a float value, so we can go you're all that material or you're none of that
material. But for amount, I always like to use some sort of black/white value. So
what I'm going to do now is from day one, I showed you guys a website that let you
procedurally generate this slide right here. It's a website. This is the website
up top. It lets you create normal maps, and most importantly, if you look right
here, we get an alpha channel for a continental to water divide. And you can
control the gradient of that and the fall off. And when I was making all these
planets for this project that we're working on, I needed to make a whole bunch
of them. And I could do it with noises, and blurs, and stretches, and UV
projections, but just the fact that there was already something available that made
it for me, I was like, "Why not just use the tool available? There's no reason for
me to reinvent the wheel." I do not have the next spinning rims on my roadmap, so I
wasn't going to play with it. So I'm going to load this image texture. Inside here,
we have surface mix map. Let's go ahead and let this one move. So now we have this
continental surface terrain that I created using that website that now is cutting
through what we just defined as our noisy surface. So if we go back to our noise
and...let's make this bigger, and play with our brightness and our contrast,
maybe our scale of the noise. We can control those two colors and get something
really interesting. We can have one of them be glossy and one of them be diffuse,
or one of them be transparent entirely, and just have a transparent texture
flowing through. And now, we're still missing one more material. So what we can
do is create another Octane material, and again, inside of our material palette,
we're going to see a new Octane material appear. And I'm going to go ahead and move
some of these nodes down over here. I'm going to take this Octane material and put
it into the top channel, and for this one, I'm going to show you an example. I'm
going to use a specular shader. The specular shader is more or less the
transparent shader, or the glass refractive. So if we move around, we can
see now that we have some nice holes in our material. So when you're designing
things like if you're trying to save some geometry in your scene, you want to do
things like lamps, or windows, or stained glass, this is often how I'll do stuff
like that. I'll have just a few layered mix shaders. And the important thing is
I'm really showing you how to make like a revolutionary, amazing looking texture
here, but the proof of concept is that by following this pretty easy to follow flow,
like okay, he has this one, this one mixing with this mat into this, you can
kind of really start to move up into the progressiveness of the quality of detail
you have in your shading. And I really wanted to show this primarily because it
was something that a lot of users that I've been working with lately in Cinema 4D
and Octane, they don't use the node graph because in Cinema, we're not really node
based artists in general. Like we have Espresso and earlier in the previous
demonstration, I did show you guys how to do some stuff in Espresso, but it was a
very small amount of nodes. And when you're working with Octane's nodal
material system, the cool thing is you can always go back to the regular channel and
show on manager, go into that one, and use the regular layer based system. And you
see on the side that every time I open these, I'm getting an independent node
version. And as I make things in the nodes, it's creating it one to one in both
worlds. So my feeling was why not use these nodes? They're a very easy, visual
flow to dive into. And all right. So the next thing that I want to do, and this may
be even more daring, is show a little quick setup for how to work with
TurbulenceFD volumes and the new volume gradient in Octane 3. So what I'm going to
do is just create a quick little scene. Let's go Live Viewer, and I'm going to put
this Live Viewer right here next to us. And I'm going to create a platonic. Let's
go ahead and solo in on that. Any piece geometry, it'll work for this, but sphere
just seemed like...just over them. Just so many spheres. I'm going to give this guy a
TurbulenceFD emitter tag. And I'm also going to give it a C4D Octane object tag.
And the Octane object tag is going to auto-magically create a... Oh actually no.
That's where I want it at all. I'm going to make a TurbulenceFD container, and then
I'm going to put a Cinema 4D object tag. And that's going to automatically create
this particle rendering tab for me, and it's going to allow me to control the way
the particles inside the voxel grid are rendered. So we're going to need to do a
sim. So let's go ahead and really make these Quadros sing. Let's go ahead and
we'll...there is an SSD on here I believe. Let me just double check that I'm not
going to overfill the C drive with doing a sim. Okay, so the C drive is a terabyte
SSD. Whenever you're working with things like TurbulenceFD or X-Particles, you're
going to be working with caches a lot. And caches need to be read on a frame by frame
basis. So if you're working off of a 5,400 RPM hard drive, and you're using that as
your cache directory because, well, it's an 8 terabyte drive, and my caches are
like 20 or 30 gigs, I like to rather delete caches along the way and not save
them to have to go back to them. I rather think of a better workflow, like saving
all your files with a name that is descriptive to the things that you
changed, rather than keeping around 40 gigabyte files, and having an SSD on your
computer that you can cache your files to. Because you're going to notice and FPS
change in your view port immensely just because of read/write time to disk. So
let's go ahead, I'm going to make a new folder here and call this
NAB_TFD_Octane3testAlpha9. And this is going to be our path. So I'm going to go
ahead, I think I'm already browsing to the path, yep. So paste this into here, select
this folder, and I'm going to create a new path. If you ever want to do something
like add vect particles, or have the particles be pushed around by the fluids,
you want to cache the velocities, it's going to increase the size of your cache
by quite a bit, so for this, and for speed, we're not going to do that. But
let's go ahead, increase the size of our volume container. The one centimeter size
of our megavoxels is quite large. For sim time and for ease of use, we are going to
increase that. You can, when you're rendering with TurbulenceFD, you can do
things like cache velocity, and then up-res the simulation to get even finer
detail. But Octane doesn't really see that because during the process, and let's go
ahead and just do some simulation settings really quick so we have an interesting sim
to work with, and I'll talk about... So Turbulence intensity, I'm going to make
this pretty big because when we blow up, when I blow up my planets, the planets
themselves are about 1,200 centimeters, so the Turbulence intensity needs to be
rather large, so then I can then play with the... I like to do things at larger
integers at first, so then I can see like, "Okay, well that was what happened at
1,000. I feel like I could probably get away with 2." But I do like to see things
dramatically and quickly, like I'll often change timescale to a much higher than
needed value just so I can see things happen quicker. So for larger size, I'm
going to set an arbitrary value of 156, and for small size, I'm going to set
another arbitrary value of 29. Well that's arbitrary, that's my wife's favorite
number. And then in vorticity, I'm also going to give it some vorticity. And
vorticity, whenever you see smoke, like burning from incense or burning from a
cigarette, or a candle, or just a fire, whenever you see wafts of smoke start
doing these tendrils and curls, this vorticity value is going to be the integer
that's multiplied by the small power in TurbulenceFD. There's a whole bunch of
really, really well done TurbulenceFD tutorials. I'm only mentioning the surface
of what these settings were doing. So if this interesting to you, I definitely
recommend looking up like, Ben Watts did an amazing one on TurbulenceFD. I've done
talks in the past on Turbulence, but let's give this a value of 12. Again, probably
bigger than it needs to be. I'm going to have temperature on, and I'm going to have
density on, because I want to use both of those to control different things in my
sim. I'm going to set both of these to a value of three and three, and I'm going to
give it some pressure. This pressure is going to be used to push the fluids away
from the surface a little faster. Again, just stuff to get us data to work with And
for the texture, for the volume texture, I'm going to use a C4D noise, and I'm
going to click right here. Oh, I don't need that, I want the actual text input.
I'm going to use gaseous because we're trying to actually make a gaseous
simulation. Let's go ahead and scroll this up here. Let me check the time. Oh, doing
good. All right, turn the brightness down, and the contrast up a little bit. All
right, cool. And now, let's go ahead and save this file just in case we crash,
because it can happen. Day two, TFD, and let's open up our simulation window. I'm
going to choose our Quadro that is currently not driving the display. I'm
going to set my container voxel size up to three for now, and let's see how that
works. Let's hit start. So TFD's insanely fast. It uses the GPU and CUDA to kind of
generate, not kind of generate, to physically represent and render what we're
creating. So yeah, this sim is wild. This is our veritable roaring fire. And it went
really quick, so I'm going to go ahead and actually lower this to one, and let that
Quadro go nuts. Maybe too ambitious with one for purposes of saving time. All
right, one is too many. Two, you can use floats in there. You don't have to use
hard integers. But I don't like working with values like 1.3 and 1.7, and other
such non-whole numbers. I prefer working with whole numbers just to avoid anything.
For some reason, I always feel like remainders and decimals are things that
cause programs to fault. I have no grounds for that statement, so someone on the
internet right now is watching is going, no! It's factually inaccurate. Okay, cool.
So now we have a 90 frame cache of a platonic just getting wild with fire, and
density, and smoke. So let's go to, let's find an interesting frame here. This one's
kind of cool because we have some smoke that's dissipating here. We have a really
hot, fiery core. And it'll let me show you guys how to do smoke and fire in our
simulation. Since I changed my voxel size to two here, one thing that Octane is
really smart about doing is setting the voxel size correctly when you apply the
tag. Thanks Ahmed, actually Ahmed, big shout out from the Cinema 4D community, on
behalf of myself, for doing an amazing job developing this plug-in for us. A lot of
us are very happy with your work. Thank you, buddy. So I'm going to go ahead and
create a new Octane object tag, and you're going to notice that the voxel size is set
to two. It's correctly interpreted. You cannot super-sample your sim by simulating
in TurbulenceFD at a 5 voxel size and then set your Octane render size to 1, or 2, or
0.5. That will do nothing but slow your machine down and make your render take a
lot longer. You will see no visual change. I know this because I tried this. Okay, so
now let's create an HDR environment, and I'm going to use an image texture inside
the HDR environment, and I'm going to use this HDR of the Milky Way, just because
it's stars and I like it. And I'm also going to create a couple objects here, an
Octane Arealight. And okay, let's just send this to the GPU. So right off the
bat, we have a lot of fire, but we're not seeing a lot of smoke. So there are some
things within our rendering. Right now also, I'm using the commander. You guys
aren't aware what is coming up. I'm hitting Shift C to search through every
possible thing that's in Cinema and get the actual one object that I want. So
let's make this much smaller, and go to kernels. I'm going to change from direct
lighting to path tracing, and I'm going to lower this down to 300. It's going to be
noisy, but we're not going for final render right now. I'm also dropping these
steps down. If I take these down to one, and one, we're not really going to have a
lot of cool data to work with. So three and three is totally fine. And here was
the a-ha Octane 3, four volume rendering setting that I did not know about when I
first started playing around with this. And thanks Patrick and Brasco from the
Motion Design Slack for working with me on this. This volume step length, this is how
the GPU calculates how dense or rich the volume is, and how much it calculates, and
how much it gets into based on the open VDB volume that is generating procedurally
from the TurbulenceFD volume. So if I change this to one, we'll start to
see...actually I think because of these Nvidia Quadros, we can actually get away
with bringing our step length down quite a bit. And what it's going to do is going to
give us a lot more, you can kind of see what's happening in the corner pockets
right here. Let's go, let's focus on this area right here. So let's get that down
here. We've got a nice range of color of black, and orange, and red, and white. But
when we were much higher at one, it was very, very, very... Or actually we started
at two, I think. It wasn't very great. So from the testing that a lot of us did in
the 3D room on the motion design slack, we found that 0.2 was where a lot of the
bounds of realistic smoke and fire lived. So now that our settings are feeling okay,
we're getting some range. These two cards are actually doing a really, really good
job. So I'm going to let it go and render to 600 from now on. Let's save this again.
And now our Octane settings for the most part for us, let's check alpha channel.
All right, we'll keep it like this. We'll keep our starry background. I'm going to
close our settings since we're not really going to get into that too much anymore.
I'm going to go to my Octane object tag, never really touching any of this. I am
going to change my absorbance scatter channel to my density channel, which is
going to give me a different level of control for when we start doing smoke.
Right now, it's primarily fire. So let's go inside and look at the scattering and
emission. We have in the newer builds, these things called volume gradients. The
fire is being generated via texture emission, so if I hop inside of this
texture channel, it's currently just using the regular color, and its power is fairly
high. So if I wanted to choke it down a little bit, I could even play with surface
brightness, but I don't usually do that. I can turn off Cast Illumination as well. So
if you have some background flames that are going off, and you're trying to
optimize and prioritize render speed in your scene, if there is no reason for your
objects to be casting illumination, turn off Cast Illumination. You're still going
to get the glows and stuff if you use post-effect bloom, you're still going to
get the value of light. You're going to get the same sensation from the render.
It's not going to affect it. But it is going to increase your render time quite a
bit. I am going to change this texture to a C4D Octane RGB spectrum. And that's
going to let me change the values to get different levels of control over what the
color and range of the flame is. And then I can also go...once I've got my color
feeling good and the power around where I want it, you can blow the power out and
let the volume really become enveloped with the emission, but we don't really
want that. So I'm just going to turn this down a little bit, just so we have a core
level of flame to work with. And then I'm going to go back into our volume gradient,
and this is where we can control, again, our color. And this slider right here,
this Max Value slider, I wish I could explain it in a way that made sense as a
cinema artist, but you can kind of imagine it like a slider to control an FCurve, if
that makes sense. Like if you're using an FCurve, like a Bézier curve, and you
clamped the levels down to only accentuate the blacks in a gradient or range, or then
lofted it way around to go the other way around, this is lets you isolate key areas
of the gradient within the volume. So if we look at these greens and reds that
exist over here in our object manager, we can play with the max value to control
where our flame lives in regards to our volume. And we're going to do this same
thing with... I'm actually going to clear this out of here, and I forgot that we're
using the volume medium over there. We can give this a little bit of power back. And
let's go back to our volume gradient and just play with this so we have a nice
clamp. Because we want to have, like in the flames, we want to have those really
nice dark and black, and really fractal-ey sections. And then now, let's go into
controlling our smoke. Oh, also density is very important, so if we bring this up to,
say, volume 11, we can get a much more dense amount of fluid that we can then,
again, go back in and adjust our power to bring it down. Everything in this extra
fall off range is what's going to be functioning as our smoke. So let's go
ahead and go into our scattering ramp. And the scattering ramp is going to function
exactly the same as our emissive ramp. We're going to C4D Octane, and use a
volume gradient. And then we can control the scattering for the smoke. For now,
let's save this, and let's turn off the temperature. And let's go ahead and put
something less than black. If you have true 000 black, which I believe that
everyone that's ever given a visual effects discussion in any room, if there
is no true black in a scene and there is no true white in a scene, so you should
almost never have a scene that's set up like that. Oh, and I'm using Octane's
Color's Chooser just because I didn't change it. I actually really like Cinema's
Color Picker, and I would prefer to use that in Octane right now. But okay. So I'm
going to give this a grey value to let the smoke. And this is when the renders are
going to really start becoming a little bit more on the heavy end. And we're going
to hop back up. Scattering functions, very similar to the way that the volume
emissions functioned. So let's turn this around here to where I have access to this
really cool, thick section. And then I'm going to go to my Octane Arealight and I'm
going to turn off normalize because it doesn't work the way that it should work.
And I'm going to change the temperature because it's too moody. And then in
visibility, I'm going to turn off camera visibility so we don't see it anymore, and
I'm going back to my light settings, and I'm going to increase the power a little
bit just so we can see it punching through the smoke a little bit more, get a little
backlight action going on here. Let's find a nice range in the gradient so we can
play with the scattering. I'm just going to turn that on so I can see what the
progress is at. All right, so let's go back to our object volume, dive into this,
and just like before, the max value. We can tweak this down to get our scattering
affecting the outer edge of our smoke, or we can clamp it way up here to drive in
and grab more of that wispiness. And yeah, so that's a basic start of volume
rendering with TurbulenceFD in Octane 3 and Cinema 4D. So I'm going to close this
now because I just got the 10 minute warning, and there's some X-Particles
stuff that I wanted to show you guys. So in our original scene that we had, we had
this...and let's open up my reference file so we don't have to build the whole thing
and we can just talk about making a cool vortex, and having objects change from one
position to the other. So let's open the file, paste everything in here, and what
we set up on our first day was these two torus objects that were going to act as
the basis of our vortex for us to emit particles from. Something that I like to
remind is that you can benefit a lot in your scene and in your design process by
using basic pieces of geometry to place things in your scene where you inevitably
want them to look much better. Previous artists are a huge aspect to any VFX
pipeline, and they really help sell an effect through. So a lot of the times,
I'll work with regular Cinema 4D objects and deformers, just to get the base level
of undulation and movement that I want from my systems. All right, and now let's
look at our setup. So this setup right here, this base system that I've created,
what I'm doing here is I'm creating... Hey, what are you doing? Let's turn this
one off. So what's happening here is I'm having a regular emitter. Let's turn off
all our modifiers and let's turn off our generator. And let's just see this play
out. Let's turn off the sprites too, and let's make this to a visibility of
something that's a better color. Actually the generator's going to come in handy
here. Why it's not, oh they're so small. This is not the one I had prepped for
this. So let's bring these torus objects down to a smaller scale just for the
purposes showing this vortex that inevitably would be the driving force of
everything. So right now, it's just emitting all these little chunks. And one
of the cool things that X-Particles has inside of it is a generator that creates
rubble. And the rubble's really, really cool. It's great for creating little extra
bits of detail in your scene. It comes in the flavor of the sprite object. My
scene's getting a little slow because I am generating whole bunch of them at random
with a lot of subdivision levels. But you get these little, what I can only refer to
as like noisy space greebles, that are basically a whole bunch or parametric
objects within Cinema that emit and take on their own form, and add a little bit of
extra detail. I'm then using an XP scale modifier to have them scale up from being
born, and then scale down over life, just so they eventually go out of their scene
on their own. And then I'm adding a little bit of turbulence, and then I'm adding an
XP vortex modifier, which is going to basically take over everything and start
spinning them and sucking them back. Let me show you what the XP vortex modifier is
doing on its own system. It's a really, really cool modifier and it has a very
specific use. It came in really, really handy for me for creating a vortex. I
don't know if anyone remembers or has seen a demonstration that I did of X-Particles
2.5 years ago at Siggraph, but it was creating a vortex without this
modifier. So one reason why I wanted to return to this was just because of how
powerful it is. So it immediately starts creating and generating a vortex. And if
you don't prefer my voice talking about this, down here inside of X-Particles, you
can click on this little guy and it will open up a video tutorial, and you can hear
the Mike Baxter's voice to tell you exactly what I'm about to tell you. So hit
F8, and this vortex is great. It's going to let us use a spline curve to control
the shape in a 2D represented silhouette of our spline curve. So we can use all
these splines to control and manipulate the way our vortex is going to spiral out.
I've already done a bunch of scene changes in our vortex file up here. So let's just
go ahead and turn these back on. I need to give a bunch more frames here. And this is
going to be moving wildly fast, because I have everything's timing increased because
I was hoping to move faster to get to this point. So I'm going to turn off our base
system up here and I'm going to turn our toruses, just so we can see the way these
particles are sucking down inside of the system. And one of the things that I did
in our base system originally up here at the top is our generator and our sprites
creating the rubble, we did what we just did on the platonic, was basically the
testing ground for how I wanted the rubble to be generated inside here. So I had
turbulence fluids emit from all these little popcorn sprites and sucked down,
and get us to what looks like...this is about 300 sample version of it, but
basically all the smoke and stuff spiraling back into the vortex and using
the TurbulenceFD sim to advect the particles. Thanks for coming, guys.