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

What is X-Particles?

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

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What is X-Particles?

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- [Instructor] So what is X-Particles? X-Particles is a plug-in for Cinema 4D developed by Insydium, so it's not part of the standard tools that ship with Cinema 4D. Particle effects have been popular for years, and are used in VFX and motion graphics from smoke, fire, and fluid simulations to creating dust, light trails, and other effects. Even though X-Particles is a plugin, it's not available in the Plugins menu. It has its own position in the interface, which makes it feel more like one of the native tools in Cinema 4D, like MoGraph, for example. Now, if you're used to the MoGraph tools, X-Particles will feel very familiar, because like MoGraph and its effectors, X-Particles uses modifiers to make changes to the particles. And it's worth noting here that you can even use MoGraph to control X-Particles, as well as the standard Cinema 4D particle modifiers and even deformers. But we'll come to that in a later chapter. If you look at this diagram, you can see we have a vast number of objects which make up X-Particles. We've got these Create objects, Emitter being very important. Generators, other objects such as the X-Particles cache, and we have dynamic objects and cloth. And as I mentioned before, to control the particles, we have modifiers, and these are grouped into four categories. Actions, motion, sprite, and generator modifiers. We also have tags, materials, and shaders, so you can see this is a very deep plugin, and diving in at this stage can feel overwhelming. I want to show you how you can add X-Particles to your toolset and have the confidence to integrate particle effects into your projects. As this is essential training, we won't cover absolutely everything. We couldn't possibly. But we're going to touch on a great deal, and where possible, I'll show you a quick setup and then we'll go into a deeper example so it's easier to follow.

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