Since that last post, I have been working on adjusting the X-Particles ring to sort out the death rate of particles, specifically so that the number of black particles floating within is equal or less than the number of coloured particles. In addition to doing this, I have also attempted to decrease the emission speed of the particles – this whole process is documented below in a walkthrough:
The process of adjusting the death rate of the particles was fairly simplistic, it was just a matter of balancing the life-span of the particles a long with the speed modifier within the material editor. I found that I only had decrease the life span of the particles by 1 0r 2 values as it was mainly the material editor that was effecting it – this was a much longer task as I tried several different changes before inverting the speed gradient which seemed to resolve the problem. As well, changing the emission speed of the particles was also fairly straight forward, I found that turning down the speed within the emission tab did solve it, however, I also had to balance it out further with the xpSpeed under the Modifiers tab to further increase the spread of the particles again. With all of those changes, this was the resulting animation:
Overall, I feel this animation is much better compared to the last one – it has tackled all of the issues that were highlighted within my reflection at the end of part 1, however, I still think that the emission speed of the particles is too fast. I feel that this is going to take a lot of fine tuning between the emission speed of the emitter and also the xpSpeed modifier, as one controls how fast the particles are emitted at and the other controls how far out they can spread. Currently, the emission speed is at 2cm, so I will try to decrease this value even lower to make them travel slower while increasing the xpSpeed modifier to further increase the spread – this should hopefully reproduce the same result I currently have, but just at a slower rate.
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