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

Making networks and grid-like patterns

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

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Making networks and grid-like patterns

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- [Instructor] In the previous movie, we learned about the Trails Modifier and how certain modifiers benefit from the path course being visualized by trails. So let's look at the Network Modifier to see how we can create grid-like patterns. So we have this emitter set up. So we're getting a particle emitted for one frame, and than an interval of two frames, and then another particle emitted. And now, what we're going to do is add a Network Modifier. So it's in the Motion Modifiers, and we'll add that to our Modifiers list, and immediately you'll see that this network is being generated, and it's really, really cool, the kind of grid-like structure that we have just for the default settings, right out of the box. We have the nice material on here. We can render that, and it looks pretty cool, the start of something really quite interesting. So, coming into the Network Modifier Settings in the Object tab, we're in this Standard operation, and what it's saying is, I'm going to change direction every 10 frames. You can vary this, of course. And so, if we increase this value, we'd have larger squares, so let's just double that, and decreasing it will give really tight, tight squares. So, something crazy happening there, very detailed. So, the Plane can be any of these, and the Direction can be positive or negative, or you can choose one or the other. So, if we set this up in a different way, let's just take a full pitch, let's take off the heading and the heading threshold, and we will just add 60 to the pitch. Shift F to rewind, and we'll just back off a bit and press Play. And now, you're seeing we're getting this honeycomb-like pattern. So, if we add some variation to that, some threshold, now we'll get kind of boxes within our honeycomb, which is really cool, and, of course, you can add some variation as well, and it kind of goes a bit crazy. But, to keep it neat, then take out the variation, and then, I would start thinking about using some data mapping. So, if we add, we can change the changing value to decrease over the age. And what we are, oh, that's actually setting to increase over the eight. So, if we just reverse this, we'll start off big, and then, it will eventually get tighter and tighter. And so, let's just play that through, and we get this really interesting looking effect there. Let's just move on and see another example. So, in this example, we have exactly what we were setting up there, which is using the heading instead. On the Network Modifier, the Falloff, I'm using this n-Side as a source for the falloff. So, when we play through, anything that's inside of that in the sample distance is going to be affected by the modifier, and anything outside of that, the particles are just going to travel off. So, we'll get this kind of unique-looking, really cool-looking simulation, and so, just render that full frame there for you. And that looks pretty cool to me. And just a little bit of experimenting with a source falloff. So let's look at one more example. So you can also change the mode to Inside Volume. And so then, we need to do is give it a volume, and other parameters go away, but we're using the n-Side once again, if we just show you that there. And you can see, this is the volume, you can give it more depth, and we'll just hide that from view, or could add a display tag, set the Mode to Lines, Wireframe. And now, when we, if we actually give that a nice color. So now, when we play this through, just making sure our Network Modifier's set to Inside Volume, and emitter is inside the volume as well, that's very important, if we just move that in, you'll see now that we're getting grid-like structure only within the bounds of that straight object. So, let's just come in and render that. And obviously, we need to hide this from view. We don't want that to be rendered. So there we have it. So that was a look at using the Network Modifier to create grid-like patterns.

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