Subtitles of the Movie

If I could choose one feature of Combustion and give it an award, it would be Particles by far. A lot of what I do entails things exploding or having a starship take off or something that involves smoke, shattering, something fun. And Combustion does these tasks remarkably well. And, of course, these would live in a Particle Operator. We can go to the File Menu, choose New and we can choose Particles from the Type. I'm going to change my background colors a little darker here. And I'll click OK. So as always, whenever you create a new Operator, the Controls for that Operator takes center stage and as you see, it says Particle Controls. Now, unlike the other Type Operator where you would have this blank field, this is actually alive. So we're able to preview our Particles when we click on one right in this field. I'll just demonstrate this to you by clicking on Plasma Jets. And behold the magic that takes place in the Preview Window. Currently the Library that I'm in is the Light Effects Library and there are all kinds of effects in there and this is really handy when you want to do a police kind of thing. Of course, you never want to see that in real life behind you. And we have some plasma tendrils and there's all kinds of great stuff in here. We have Bright Comet. And I'm going to just keep this here to show you something extremely cool about Combustion. Not only do you get to preview a still effect, you can actually move it around yourself to envision what your animation might look like. So what about having a comet come crashing down from the top? OK. I'll click and drag my mouse and I have moved this entire particle. How cool is that? And I can do the same thing for many of these particles. Simply click and drag it and move it around to see what happens. Let's go ahead and load a different Library this time. I'll go to this little Arrow here and I'll choose to bring in Smoke. I could also choose to Load a Library by clicking this button right here. So I'll click Load Library and Combustion intelligently knows where the Particle Library lives and it goes there. So we have Abstract, Blank, Default, Fire, Explosions and More. I'll talk in great depth about Particles later on, but I do want to show you again how this preview works. We have this Oil Fire Meteor. I can click and drag it around and we can see the smoke trail and everything in real time and this is always something really cool. You don't have to worry about what it might look like in your composite. You can see it before you apply it. So we'll talk more about how to use the Particle Operator, but I guarantee you that this might become your favorite feature as it has become mine and I love some particles and I think that once we get to the section on Particles, you might just want to watch that particle like 50, 60 million times.