Electric Image Animation System 7 Tutorials
Plugins / Mr. Nitro pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (Electric Image Animation System 7 / Plugins / Mr. Nitro pt. 1)
The next plug-in we'll examine is called Mr. Nitro and it's a lot of fun. There are two Mr. Nitros as we see here in the Plugin Menu and they're nearly identical. Mr. Nitro 2 has a few more features and is the version we'll be examining. The original Mr. Nitro is also here to keep it compatible with old projects. I've already created a Mr. Nitro 2 object. Also in this theme is a teapot. With many of the plugins you'll encounter, the plug-in requires that you attach objects as children to the plug-in in order for the effect to work. We want Mr. Nitro to explode the teapot so I'll select the teapot and use the Parent Tool to attach it to the plug-in like this. Let's go ahead and preview in the Camera Window. And the teapot shatters into pieces. Now, if you look closely, you'll see a wireframe of an expanding sphere. That's the blast force of Mr. Nitro. Let's top and look at the Plugins Controls. There are three tabs which control all the parameters of the explosion and the debris it makes. The Blast Waves Controls define the blast itself; how fast it moves, its powers and so forth. The External Forces Tab contains controls for air and gravity, things that affect the strength of the blast. And Fragment Settings set color and shape of your model's chunks. First, the Blast Waves Tab. The first filed, Blast Time, sets when the blast occurs. It can start before Frame 0 if you want or much later. Use Manual Timing is an option to keyframe the timing of the blast. You need to have animation enabled for the plug-in for this to work. I know it sounds a little odd to have to set keyframes for a plug-in that already creates animation, but this can create some cool slowing-motion effect. So let's check on Use Manual Timing. Let's click OK and move on in time a bit to the two-second mark, then back to the Plugin Controls and change the Simulation Time to be two seconds. So far the Plugin Simulation Time matches real time. Again, further in time to around four or so seconds, back to the Plugin and change the Simulation Time to three seconds. Finally one more keyframe near the end and back to the controls and we've set a Simulation Time of one second. I think you can tell what's about to happen by what you see in the Camera Window. Let's preview. The blast slows down, then runs backwards. But there's a little hitch. Let's send the Simulation Time to the Function Curve Editor and smooth out our timing. Twirl down and double click the Sockets Channel. Now, in the FCE, let's make the velocity look like it slows down to here and the speeds up. Let's preview. Cool. But now let's clear out our keyframes and look at the controls again. Uncheck Manual Timing. From now on Mr. Nitro time matches real time. Ground Zero position is pretty self-explanatory. If you want the blast to occur in the middle of your model that you're exploding, these values should match the location of your model in World Space. Below we have the option to have two blasts. The inner blast follows the outer blast in time. The percentage values for each blast determines how much the total damage that blast is making. The outer blast defaults to 100 percent so you wouldn't see a second blast wave hit your model. Speed is how fast the blast wave is traveling through your scene. Rotation and Turbulence Fields spin and offset the debris so that the pieces act realistically instead of just shooting away straight from the center. The Force Fields are the actual strength of the blast. Where speed is how fast the blast force travels or eats its way through the model, the force is the reaction of the debris knocked away from the blast. Next tab, External Forces, let's you set drift of the debris due to gravity. Of course, you can choose to have the so-called gravity pull in any direction, not just down. Again, these fields create a 3D slope as we've seen in other tools. Ground Level is where the debris stops and disappears. If you don't want the debris to disappear, then set a low ground level as I have here. Air Resistance will also help slow down the debris flying away and the Dissolve Field is the time that you want the pieces to disintegrate into nothing. If you don't want the pieces to disappear, then leave this set to zero. But I want to see what dissolve looks like so I'll set it to three seconds, click OK and we'll preview. And the pieces shrink to nothing. Very nice.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Electric Image Animation System 7 |
| Author: | Scott Simmons |
| SKU: | 33996 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-45-9 |
| Release Date: | 2009-06-01 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 102 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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