From the course: X-Particles 4 for Cinema 4D Essential Training

Advecting particles and caching ExplosiaFX

From the course: X-Particles 4 for Cinema 4D Essential Training

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Advecting particles and caching ExplosiaFX

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to look at caching ExplosiaFX and how we can use the EFX object to affect particles. So, what we're going to do is create a cache but first, let's just look through this scene. We've got the fire being created by the EFX object and, of course, if we start scrubbing, there's no way of playing this back properly. So, I'm going to rewind. I'm going to create a cache and we'll save it to the desktop and the important thing to note, here, is the EFX format. Now if you're going to use or reuse the cache within X-particles, keep the format on X-particles. If you're going to use it in something else, like a third party renderer, then choose open VDB. I'm going to keep it on X-particles and we'll just build the cache. So with the cache done, we can just jump in any frame and just start scrubbing the timeline and we get this really lovely, smooth playback for the result. So that's cached to the desktop. Let's look at another scene where we can use this cache. In this scene, we've just got an emitter and it's just emitting onto the torus that we have, here. In our other objects folder, we'll create a cache object and what we want to do is load in that cache, now. So, we'll also create an ExplosiaFX object, as well. We'll add that to our dynamics and now, what we want to do. The thing to make sure of is that your ExplosiaFX object is named the same as the one that was cached because the cache is going to look in the list for that named object and then it will apply a cache tag to it and everything should work. So that's just one thing to remember. We'll use the ellipses button, here, to load in this cache and you can see it's named EFXExplosiaFX, which is the default name. So, I'm just going to choose to open the root folder and you can see now that the names match and a tag has been created and because we're scrubbed through into the timeline, we can immediately see the result in the view port. So if we rewind and play, we're getting that EFX happening and it's just super smooth. So we can scrub back and forth. Now I'm going to rewind and what we want to do now is on the EFX object, we'll come over to the advection tab and choose advect particles. Advection is one of the coolest features of the EFX object. By enabling this option, you're essentially turning the EFX object into a particle modifier. So let's just see what's happening. Well, if we start playing through, we now can hide the EFX object, as well. Those particles have just gone absolutely crazy and they've taken on the attributes with the particle formation. That's within the ExplosiaFX object. So if we look on our emitter, we've just set it up so that the display is taking gradient parameter and we're taking the fuel parameter and then just mapping these colors to that and we're getting some pretty nice feedback in the view port, here. If I just press command R, it can render. We'll see this result because we have an X-particles material on the emitter. You can, of course, render ExplosiaFX with the gaseous material, which we'll come to in a later movie. So let's just play through this once more and you can see that we get really fluid, natural movements from the particles and it looks really, really nice. So let's just have a look at another example. So in this system, we've got an ExplosiaFX and the emitter is emitting onto some hand geometry and that's all being passed on to this other system, which is inheriting everything. Because we have advection turned on, this emitter is going to take that information and, using the inherit modifier, it's going to take the information from this other system. Well, let's just play through and see what we've got. So we can see, now, what's happening here and this looks really nice. If you go up to scene, now, I've got an animated camera here so let's just look through that and we get this really cool looking result. So, another use for Explosia and the advection. It's really useful, it's really fun, and I just think you'll start using it in a lot of projects now because you get that really fluid, natural movement from the particles.

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