Welcome to your first particle system.
In this video you will create a particle system understand children and how they relate to their parents
and hopefully avoid crashing your computer or waiting a very long time.
So let's hop straight on over in a blender.
Okay.
So we're back over in blender and we have our rabbits in front of us.
So the first thing I'm going to do is open up a brand new blender fine because what I don't want to
do is start playing about with our model just at this moment.
I want to learn the technique of the particle system.
So make sure your file is saved.
I'll do that now for mine.
And we're going to open up a brand new blender file.
Great.
So we've got the default cube in front of us and we need to add our first particle system.
So if I pull out this area here on the left hand side we will see that we have these things that look
like stars are just bring down the outline as well.
And that is a particles as we go over it.
We can see that so when we click on that we get a blank screen because there is no particle system at
the moment.
So go ahead.
Going to go ahead and create a new particle system and I'm going to call it Hey 3q.
Excellent.
And I'm going to here on the settings also call it hairy cubes so I know that what I'm setting up here
and we can use this as a base to generate more particle systems from once we've got it roughly right.
So type Well we're not going to do an emission at the moment we're going to do a hair.
So we're going to switch that across to here and lo and behold we've got ourselves some hairs coming
out of our cube quite long hairs.
And if we go out and render that it will look quite dim at the moment so let's go to the lamp and make
the lamp properties give it a sun so it's nice and bright.
There we go.
So you get a better idea of what it's going to look like and there are a thousand hairs in this scene.
Now there is a fine balance to be struck so let's go back to the cube and the oh just whilst we're hearing
you've got a spanner against there and not a sparkly icon.
Well the particle system is a modifier.
But as you can see here the settings are done over here rather than in the usual way that you manage
modifiers.
So if we click on the particle properties we can carry on going down here.
Now advance does give you further options and we're not going to deal with that at the moment and segments
tells us how many kinks in this hair will actually be the more segments you have the more smooth you
can comb hair have it deform etcetera.
But I would suggest you leave out five more segments you have the more computationally heavy.
It's going to be to calculate that here.
Now the emission down here tells us the number of hairs and we can see that there are 1000 hairs and
the hair length pretty self-explanatory is the length of a hair.
I'm going to go back to solid view here and the hair length.
If we pull that down we get a hairy cube still but not quite as hairy.
And depending on what you're modelling you will want a certain length of hair of course.
Now if we go down we're going to ignore hair dynamics for the moment how we're going to ignore the random
stuff we'll go back to that in a bit.
And as we come down we can see children.
So if we go to children and we've got two options for the type of children now the best way of demonstrating
interpolated is not on a cube.
So I will create another object in a moment and we're have a closer look at that.
But simple and elated are going to look pretty similar.
Oh actually that's quite nice around the edge of the cubes.
So it does give us an idea of what impeller interpolated does rather than just being simple.
So the way that the simple hairs are generated is they are created around the parents.
So in this case on the display setting you can see we've got 10 children for each individual parent
or for each individual emission no at the top here so that's taken our total up to 10000 hairs on the
screen.
In fact I'm just going to move these up so I can see in fact you can grab bees by the way and move them
about so I'm going to lift that up.
So they're right next to one another so you can see what's going on on both of these.
So the number of children when it's simple it's they're produced within a radius around our our primary
hair are mission hair.
And that can lead to things like this where the hairs are being generated a way from the skin or the
surface of your model.
And that's generally okay if you've got a large flat area and no one's going to notice.
But if you start having hairs coming out there's blatantly no skin.
With the case of our rabbit is going to look a bit odd.
So you'll actually want to use interpolated.
And this does do a good job at showing it as the hairs come round this corner.
You can see that they're still stuck to the surface of our model and they follow the corner as it goes
round rather than just leaving it with a 90 degree cross-section there.
So that's a very powerful way in the same as they come around this corner all these three edges where
they meet.
It's nice and divided as it goes.
Now do be warned the multiplication of this emission number and the display.
No.
If it gets too high will either crash your computer or take ages to calculate.
So I went and put a thousand in here and I hope it doesn't muck up whilst doing a live video.
I get my spinning wheel.
I've done this before I know it's going to work but I may have to pause a video or at least speed it
up whilst that goes through.
But that's now going to have a million hairs in it a thousand times.
So each one of those original admissions the parents will have a thousand hairs associated with it.
So that is quite a lot of hairs.
Now the other thing that makes a difference is the scale of our object.
Now it sounds a bit odd that it would make a difference but if you think about it if you've got a thousand
hairs on something the size of a marble compared to a 1000 hairs on something the size of a football
they're going to be less dense on the football because it's got a large area to cover.
So in general the larger your object is the more hairs you're going to need or the not more particle
you're going to need to cover that with the same density as you would if it was a smaller object.
And I think I've done a wonderful job here in showing you not the numbers to type in specially when
doing a video for you guys but you can see here that the program hasn't crashed.
It's simply taking a very long time to calculate 1 million hairs and that's what you don't want to happen
especially when youre mucking around with a blender.
Now this generally happens to me when Im playing with the number and I go back and I change the admission
no forgetting I have left the children high or the mission numbers already high and I add a large number
of the children so do be careful whenever you do that and I'm probably going to force quick blender
here and be right back with you.
In fact I can see here in my activity monitor you can use your task manager that it's actually it's
actually using 100 percent of the s.p. you at the moment.
Now this is one of those things that it's not multi core compatible unlike rendering which is the actual
generation of the hairs.
It's only done on one core of your s.p. you so it's not going to be as fast as some of the other things
you've been doing.
Glenn and I can see here it's actually still working all of that out.
But to be quite honest I don't care.
I want to carry on teaching you guys so I'm going to quit that and build up my cube again for you.
So here I am just recreating where we were before but without the one million hairs and I'm just going
to click this little handle here and pull it up so it's next to.
This area here and of course if we add some simple children there were only 10 that gets a bit thicker
that's dragged the hair length back down to about here change it interpolated and we get a much better
idea of what's going on now in terms of numbers.
In general you will have to play with it.
If I now scale this cube outward so it's 15 times larger than it was before the hairs are now ridiculously
short for this style of model so we'd have to increase them.
So it looks roughly the same but now they're far less dense and the same is true.
If I were to scale that right in oh dear that's I don't know how small of actually made that.
Let's bring those all in.
All right we've got a tiny cube So let's zoom in.
Now the hairs are much more dense.
And you'll notice that we've got a display number and a random number.
So at the moment if we were to not hear if we go into random mode here that is still the same number
that's on this display here.
But if we go to render and render out the image it will do a lot of calculations and then it will render
with the cube at once with 100 hairs on it.
And you can probably see that's very pixellated carcillo rest.
But there are many more hairs in there than there are otherwise.
So in general your wants the children set to interpolated.
And the number of emissions where you going to have to play with that.
But do be careful that you do not crash your system.
Okay guys it's Challenge time.
I'd like you to create hair for your bunny.
So give our bunny some fur apply a hair particle system to the rabbit mash.
Don't worry about the detail of it just yet.
And your bunny will look funny at this stage.
Don't worry.
We'll be sorting that out soon.
So pause the video now and create hair for your bunny.
Okay guys.
Welcome back.
Let's hop over into blender and create some bunny fur.
Okay so we're back in blender Let's go ahead and open up if you've not done already your fluffy bunny
and it's not that fluffy at the moment so let's make it a fluffy bunny.
So I need to pull this out so I can see what's going on at a particle system and I'm going to call mine
a body hair.
I'm going to call this body hair as well.
Cain changed the type to hair.
And that's really long hair.
So let's lower that back down to.
We do point to for the moment that looks a decent length okay.
But it's pretty sparse at the moment.
We'll turn on the other layers that we have because otherwise when I render they won't appear to just
render that image and see how it comes out of the camera isn't position.
But we can see there that the hairs unno good at all.
So let's give it some thicker fur without crashing the computer.
So let's head back over to the 3-d view and let's try 10000 hairs right that's starting to look a bit
better.
That's a good you kind of get a feeling after a while of what is a good overall hair density.
Before you start adding children in so let's go down to children.
And were you notice that this is in a different position to where it was before in the last example
video.
And that's simply because the positions of all of these are saved in the actual blend file itself.
I'm not going to move this one up.
I'm going to set it to interpolated.
And we end up with a much thicker mesh and blenders just ever so slightly jerky for me at this point
in time which is okay.
I'm not bothered with that but I do want to just orientate the camera.
So let's go to camera view.
So when I do do any rendering so let's move it up a little.
And probably just rotate it around a little as well so rotates well.
That way would be fine.
In fact the way I keep looking at it from would be even better.
Move it down to about there and then move it again this time away from the camera.
So let's see how that looks when we render it again.
Being as lean as possible to try and get a good idea about how the end result is going to look.
It's going to look pretty disastrous of course at the moment because we have not styled the hair colour
the hair or anything else we'll get to that in a bit.
And let's just see how this is coming out.
Okay so that looks like a good level of fluff.
What is important is that I can't see the skin underneath.
So there we go we've got a good start for a fluffy bunny.
The ears are certainly far too fluffy at the moment because they're not like that on a normal bunny.
There's good space around the eyes.
Head hair is not usually this long but we can deal with that as well.
Let's skip around to my 3-d view and see in rendered form with 10 samples.
That's skewed round to the light side.
In fact I'm going to change the lamp type to a Hemi.
Rather than anything else because then it's going to have a direction but it's also to brighten up our
scene really well so we can see there we've got oh it looks like I'm missing the other I.
Yes I am missing the other.
So in this case I'm going to quickly go to where we've got sphere and call them eyes.
I'm going to add a mirror modifier should have done this before and make the mirror object the rabbit.
And we should end up with an eye on the other side.
Perfect.
Okay so this is looking good.
We've got our rough rabbits formed not not quite there yet.
We've got plenty of work to do left on are a bit going to go back to solid view and in certain places
of course it does look like you're seeing through it but that's fine.
That's because all the hairs are currently standing up on end.
Now I think that is a good starting point.
Most of these hairs in a bit will be transferred to here so we're going to do some more adjusting anyway.
That is a great start.
How do you guys get on how fluffy has your bunny ended up pretty sheraton's discussions.
I will see you guys in the next lecture.