Subtitles of the Movie

Particles are just like any other thing that you can modify in your computer, like fonts that you can make bold or italics or shapes that you can color with an outline or a fill color. Particles also have a range of different tools and options available to you that allow you to change the particle, how it works and how it looks. I'm going to use in my Abstract Library a particle that's not going to take up too many system resources as we explore this. So I'm going to double click on the Splashes here and I'm going to click to add an Emitter on my first frame. I'm going to scrub a little bit to show you that we have all these different sprites in here. The controls are in this little List here in our Particle Controls Tab. So I'm going to click Emitter. The emitter is extremely important because without it, we'd have no particles. Think of an emitter as a gardening hose. The water that comes out of the hose are your particles and the emitter is the nozzle on your hose. Same thing is true here. This little guy in the case of this guy is a point emitter is ejecting these shapes. We can always change the emitter type, by the way, if we're not happy with it by going where it says Shape. So when I double click on the Shape, it tells me that it wanted to be a Point Emitter, but I'm going to make it a Line here and now a Circle and an Area Emitter. You can always change it if you want to. We can also change the emission angle so we can change exactly how the particles are going to spray out of there. We can change the range and the visibility. So if you don't really want to have a very bright particle, just drop that down a little bit. Now, this is an important one here; Preload Frames. Sometimes when you have a particle effect, you'll see a burst right away. And you might not always want that. So let me go to the first frame here and show you. When we first created this particle, it looked like this. But if I don't want the particle to show up just yet, I'm going to tell Combustion to not preload any frames when it starts and only start to add it later on. Or if you want to do a very quick explosion, you might very well want to have a burst like so and then build from there. We can also work with the tint of the particle. So we can click on this guy here, give it color and we can use this slider here to change the tint strength. Life simply means how long the particles last before they die. And yes, particles do die. They fade away and new particles are generated. We can determine how many particles by using the Number Slider, the size of those particles, the velocity, which is the speed at which they erupt from the emitter, the weight, which will give us some gravity and as I add more weight, you'll notice that the particles sag towards the ground. We can affect the spin of those particle shapes and we can add some random motion to it, a bounce and even some zoom. You can also transform your emitter as you could by clicking here but you can use the sliders if you want to be very accurate. We're going to talk later on about how to make our own custom particles and we're going to play around with these little sprites later on. And last but not least, we can enable the motion blur of your particles. I generally don't do that because it really can slow down the particle effect and I find that the particles look pretty fine as they are. So these are some of the tools and options available to us when it comes to changing how our particles function inside of Combustion.