Particle Clouds & more
McGuiver
Posts: 219
I have been experimently heavily with particles & their shaders lately....have done rocket exhausts, fire & most recently animatable & reshapable clouds.
The clouds use a vertex object as their emitter, so it is possible to shape the clouds however you wish....I used a simple vertex "heart" shape to illustrate.
The keys to making the clouds are in the shader & the emitter settings.
My shader makes the particles start small, rotate & fade away over time....great for animating.
I am including several area renders with only 1-shader change just to show how wild it can change.
Also my shader & particle settings.
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Here Are the Shader & Particle Settings.
Hope someone finds it useful....some of the shader settings work great for rockets and fire....experiment.
Very interresting, thanks a lot !
One thing, I don't know what is "Facing camera".
I'm not sure of the technicals, but he particle, or its shader always face the rendering camera...even if the camera is animated.
Absolutely beautiful, thanks for sharing!
This is awesome! I love particles. Especially since they can tie into shaders so nicely in Carrara... this is really cool, McGuiver... Thanks a million!
Nice, If you want I can host that simple scene on my GoogleDrive, or you can send me the shader presets and I'll make the example scene with the rocket or whatever, that is if you want to share your scene file
thank you a lot McGuiver please keep on testing
Linked to this in Learning Carrara and need some help?
Thanks McGuiver. These will help of course... just thinking about messing with particles again, it's been quite awhile, last night.
Thanks McGuiver, that's very kind. Boy you have been a Carrara user for a long time.
pretties! thanks
Cool stuff! Thanks for sharing!
Then we just need to play close atention to the emitter settings which, again, are laid before us very nicely.
I'm going to have a play with this very soon. It just looks fun - and I've been having all too much fun with particles lately!
OK, if I understand well, the "Facing Camera" works with the shader only...
Well, nothing will render in Carrara without a shader.
"Facing Camera" is like a plane which is always perpendicular to the camera, no matter what the particles or the camera do. So if they look like they're not facing the camera, they will be when they're rendered.
So if the shader is just a solid red color, for example, we'll see red squares as particles.
How we often use this is to put an Alpha Mask in the alpha channel. McGuiver's cool shader example shows how he made this mask procedurally. I've always just made a mask image. I cannot wait to try this (his) method!
Against that he's added a multiplier to have the alpha channel fade out to zero (invisible) according to the life of the particle. Pretty cool!
I just got back from a few days of vacation.....still have catch-up work to do, so here's a quick animatable fire/rocket exhaust.
Very cool! I was just going to work on something like this. Great timing. Thank you.
Finally had some time to play with this - super cool effect @McGuiver!
In the image below I left all your settings more or less the same except for editing the particle size to match my scene, removing the color and dropping a lightning sprite image into the glow channel and instead of using a heart shape I used a dummy human stand-in with a stone shader (which I normally use to size things when modeling things in a scene).
The lightning sprite image I used was generated in FilterForge (see attached).
McGuiver, Very cool... Thanks.
MDO, Really nice looking effect.
Just checked and FilterForge is 80% off, one day left.
With the shader referenced above, particles hitting and sticking to an invisible plane..... changed the color gradient, used "water- ripples & set the emitter to 3 particles per second..........renders instantly & pretty cool when animated.
Then knock the emitter down to 3/second, and then using the Advanced tab to cause them to stick?
This has many, Many possiblities for some really cool, fast, and fun vfx!
Thanks for these fun tips!
...and it's just plain awesome to see you posting again, McGuiver! Rock On!!!
Or are you using Water Ripples as the Alpha driver?
I'm using the Water Ripples in place of the turbulence. The shader setup uses the gradient to make the water ripples (or whatever I use) fade out on the edges. The water ripples are the pattern & the glow channel drives the color over the age of the particle.
You could also use the color channel instead of the glow channel, but for fire, you need the glow.
Fantastic! Thanks! Yeah... after my first question was posted... it hit me that the ripples would be alpha or perhaps even transparency for a different effect.
I really like using gradients in both Color and Glow, and when the Glow gradient hits black or really dark, the lights take over, hitting the Color channel - which can work really well for simulating smoke after fire. That's how I made this Dragon Fire
One of my self-imposed homework assignments coming up is the use of animated clips in the particles - Lighting and Fire and rocks and smoke. This is supposed to lead to a whole lot of particle use with animated particles, if it turns out right. The Carrara particle emitter is a really useful thing. I've just learned how to use it to make a 360 degree star field, but I still like my Stars better ;) Also how to use it to make blood splatter - but I don't want that in my stuff... no gore. But the techniques will work good for throwing mud at the camera!
This thread is very refreshing - because you use an entirely different take on certain things that make this whole thing a lot more flexible... amazing how a little nudge can turn into a whole world of awe!