Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Particle Systems
This tutorial was written for Blender v2.49
Particle systems are used to simulate large amounts of small moving objects, creating phenomena of higher order like fire, dust, clouds, smoke, or fur, grass and other strand based objects. You may also use other objects as a visualization of particles.
Before you start with the tutorials, you should at least take a brief overview about the very extensive manual pages of the particle system. You will find every single parameter explained in the manual if you have the desire to delve deeper ...
Don't forget: particles alone don't do any magic. They are only a placeholder for something nice to view. You have to take care of the visualization also, and that is usually the harder part than to create the particle system.
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[edit] The very first particle system
[edit] Creating a particle system
To create a particle system:
- insert a plane
- select the object (only mesh objects can emit particles)
- change to the object buttons and to the particle subcontext
- click on Add new (Img. 1a)
Voila, your first particle system! It doesn't do anything useful now, but we're going to change that on the following pages.
- To see any particles press Alt-A. The frames change and you see particles appear. Press Esc to stop the animation.
You return to frame 1. The particle movement is cached (stored), so if you play your animation again it will go faster (well, you won't notice any difference in this simple case).
- If you want to stop in a certain frame, press Space.
- The shortcut for returning to the first frame is (Shift + Left Arrow)
- To see the particles even better change to wireframe mode (Z),
If you change anything in your particle system you always have to return to frame 1, to recalculate the system from start.
Use a timeline window to change easily between frames (Img. 1b).
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Ultra Physics Coolness:
Now you can move the objects in the 3D window and the particle system is updated in realtime. The system is not cached then. |
[edit] Changing properties of the system
The most important properties are probably:
- Amount: the total number of particles
- Sta/End: the start and end frame of the emission
- Life: the lifetime of the particles
- The initial velocity. This is often set with Normal causing the particles to get a speed in the direction of the face normal (if emitted from faces).
- A constant global force. AccX/Y/Z set's a force in the respective direction.
For now change:
- the Amount to 5000
- the Lifetime to 100 frames
- the Normal value to 1.0.
The Particles are emitted directly upwards (if your plane is orientated that way) and life for 100 frames.
If you render now, you will see a white "Blob". This is the default Halo rendering of the particles.
[edit] Changing the material of the particles
- Change to the Shading buttons and assign a material to the plane.
- Activate Halo in the Links and Pipeline panel.
The Halo settings are in the Shaders panel. The color of the Halo is set in the Material panel (see also the Manual on Halos). Halos are a post rendering effect, that is applied after the scene is finished. So halos can't shed any lights on other objects, they are not rendered behind RayTransp materials (like glass).
- Set the Halo color to deep blue (RGB: 0/0/1)
next go to the "shaders" tab to the right of the "links and pipelines" tab.
- Halo Size: 0.05 so each halo is quite small.
- Hard: 127 so that each halo has the maximum sharp edge
- Add: 0.5 so that the brightness increases where several halos overlap
Set the world color to black and render (Img. 3b). Nothing special till now, but that will change soon. So proceed to the next page, where we're going to make some fire.
[edit] Links
- Blender 2.49b Basic Particles Video Tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwsR8v5VE4M
