Particles for dirt

Mosk the Scribe

I'm doing a scene in C8.5 Pro where people are shoveling out a grave.

Ideally, I'd add a particle emitter to the 'dirt' (which is just a textured vertex object attached t the shovel) and then a second identical vertex object which isn't parented, which is turned visible and dropped to the ground after a few seconds, while initial object is made invisible.

The scene currently has 2 dressed genesis figures, and everything gets too slow to use if I try adding 4 particle emitters to go with these 'dirt' items.

So, one possibility is just to simulate this in After Effects CS6

Another might be to just render the dirt objects with their particle emitters and then composite afterward - but I'm not sure how (or if there's a way) to only render the dirt while maintaining its exact position and timing (because dirt is parented to shovel, which is parented to a figure's hand and manually rotated) - so can't remove the figures. If I simply turn them invisible, does that help carrara - or is it still likely to bog down in multiple simulations.

Is there a way to make 4 different independently moving objects use the same emitter?

Any suggestions?

(currently my best bet seems to be to render the whole scene without the dirt; then render just the dirt and do the rest in After Effects - but the particles of dirt did look nice on a couple of stills and wouldn't mind giving this a shot if someone could describe a good method.

Thanks

WendyLuvsCatz

I would render just the particles as an image series with an alpha and then texture planes looping it myself

DUDU

Here a Cripeman's tutorial where he shows how to use four differents objects in the same emittor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-m2tKFGaeU
I often use a mix of direct render of the particles in the scene and postwork.

Mosk the Scribe

I'd like to get the particles synched up (for position and rotation) with the end of the shovel.

Right now I'm simply hiding everything but the dirt and rendering the dirt by itself (had hoped it would only take a couple of clicks with Fenric's visibility controller - but getting an error when I try to use that, so just selecting every item but dirt and shutting visibility

Was wondering if there's a way to copy the motion and rotation of the dirt (or export as animated object) - so I could then eliminate all the other figures and try with the particle system using my dirt clumps as emitters for smaller bits of dirt.

Dartanbeck

I wouldn't.
Just drag-select everything but the dirt and set it all invisible. That way everything remains parented and working properly.

But if you really wanted to delete instead of simply making invisible, you could parent the dirt emitters to target helpers that are animated themselves, rather than relying on being parented for their motion. This makes everything independent.

You can use Carrara to do all of your compositing, too. This works very well, especially if you want to have some camera movement.

Do the first animated sequence render without the dirt emitters.

Add that render into the Background of the scene and set everything but the dirt to invisible, and use the same camera to render with.

Another note about particle emitters:
Sometimes it can be easier and faster to simply use "Facing Camera" as the emitted object within the emitter, rather than an object. Then make a shader to represent what you want.
Use could blend some colored noise with an alpha mask to represent the dirt in a shader

I've also found that, using few particles greatly increases render speed. So try to come up with the largest size that you can for the proper effect, and use less of them.

I was taught particles from Advanced Carrara Techniques, and then tweaked what Phil has taught me. I say this because he demonstrates how to set up the shaders that progress according to the lifetime of the particles. This stuff is covered in the manual, if you don't have the training course. The particles portion is, after all, a very small portion of the training. If you have Phil's course, it's an eleven and a half minute section: Chapter 11, part 1 which covers emitting particles to make the thruster emission of a rocket ship. So it's a fairly quick lesson, but it has really helped me to finally get into using the particles system, as I haven't even tried it before seeing the video.
But if you have that lesson, I've repeated the experiment, but in the emitter I've set the sizes to be much larger and set it to emit a lot less particles, and it renders much faster.

Finally, depending upon the nature of the scene, metaballs as the particles might be another easy answer to making dirt.

evilproducer

Keep the figures, and apply a shadow catcher to them and render with an alpha channel. Even if you don't need the shadow catcher for shadows, it will act as a mask for anything behind (or partially behind) the object with the shadow catcher.

Dartanbeck

Check out what's coming in Project Dogwaffle Pro: Howler 9.5!
You can airbrush the shapes of your particles!
Early Cloud Animation using the Particle Modeler!