Subtitles of the Movie

Particle effects are another part of the dynamics section in Maya. To create a particle effect you can head to Particles, Create Emitter, and Options. So the type of Emitter here; you can choose an Omni-Directional Emitter, or a Directional one or a Volume one. So I'm going to choose the Omni, and go ahead and create this, and it creates a little locator that can be transformed. And I'll set a long timeline again, let's say 500 frames, rewind. And I'll play this back at 24 frames a second, hit save. And now when I hit Play I'll get a random collection of particles spewing out over time, and you can see it's as if they're in space, they're just maintaining a trajectory off their initial emission from the center. Hit stop there, I can see what's been created. Now go ahead and rewind this, and reselect the emitter and head to the Attribute Editor. And now we can go in and start changing some of these things such as the speed of the emission, or randomness on that speed. So right now when you hit play here you can see that these are all traveling at the same speed. If I increase the randomness here let's say to point five, now we'll get some objects or some particles spewing out at a different rate up to 50 percent different than the others. Another interesting thing you can do with a particle effect is - I'm going to go ahead and select these particles and you can see this is a separate node from the emitter. So if I delete that emitter, I still have the particles in the scene. Now by themselves right now - oh didn't mean to do that, let me create that again, I'll go back to Particles, Create Emitter and hit Play. The thing I forgot to do is something that is common in dynamics, and that is setting the initial state of your simulation. So what that means is, I'm going to let this spew out some particles, and then select that particle shape node under Solvers, Initial State, Set for Selected. So that means now if I rewind I still have that particle shape there. So I can go ahead and delete the others, and now if I rewind that's still in the scene, and if I hit play you can see they're going to continue with the inertia they had flowing outward, but there's no emitter left so no new particles are created. OK if I select these guys now and create a field or a force that can affect them we can see some interesting things happen to this. So first I'm going to set the, select the particles, and then under fields create something like a Air. I hit Play, and you can see the Air is a little fan that's blowing all those guys straight up. And I'll go ahead and delete that air field, reselect these guys at frame one, and go back to fields, create something like a turbulence. And this will act like a noise that's flowing through those guys. So you can see some randomness happening as they flow all around. And this is the sort of thing - let me go ahead and rewind, yeah I'll rewind and I'll set this to even longer, let's say 2,000 frames so we can really watch that. Rewind, got my turbulence field selected, I'll hit play and now you can adjust things like the magnitude, that's the force of the randomness of this turbulence field. So if I hit 20, 50, so you can see it's really sending these guys all over the place here with the high magnitude. Hit stop and rewind that again and play. So you can see there a very high magnitude on that turbulence field. OK rewind, and something else we can do - let me delete those guy - is create a directional Emitter. So back to Particles, Create Emitter, go to the options here, set it to be directional, and I'll just hit the defaults. So this when I play is going to just send out a little stream of particles in a row. So if I want to get a sort of a cone there I can head to, let me go to the attribute editor here for my emitter. And I'll close up some of these fields here. OK so the spread in the distance in direction attributes. If I play this you'll see now we get a little sort of cone as those spread out of the back there. And these guys, if I set some animation - let me go to a front view there and check that - OK so I'll rewind and I'm going to set some animation on the emitter node. So I'll set it down here and key it, up here key it, key it. So now I have that little path being traveled, and now when I play you can see you get a nice little trail following that emitter object around. So you can take these and parent them to other objects that you've animated. If I had a rocket ship for example in the scene, I can just parent emitters onto its thruster cones and I'll get particles spewing out of the back. OK so this works well for something in space, what about - let me go ahead and delete the animation keys on there - what about something that's earthbound? So I'll delete those keys, rewind and if I play this now I'm going to get particles spewing out. And what I want to do is add a gravity field to these guys. So under Fields, Gravity with that node selected, Rewind, and now you'll see they just start pouring off of there. OK so those are just some of the basics on creating particles.