Once the assets were all added to the final scene file, I came to the conclusion that it looked a little bit empty – this was either to do with the camera angle or the fact that the X-Particles ring was too large for the cube. To fill this empty space, I decided add some fog or space dust to the scene.
After adding this element to my scene, it changed the whole dynamic of the it – although its very subtle, I feel it adds something interesting for the viewer to look at.
With Fog:
Without Fog:
Now that I had resolved the emission problem since the last post, I can focus on integrating the two assets together – prior to this post, they have always been separate. The time-lapse below shows the process of integrating them together into the final scene file for the project and some additional problems that I over came during this process.
To show off the final scene and position/location of each asset within, I have provided some renders below at different angles to help denote this:
After a lot tweaking with the settings, I finally managed to reduce the emission speed of the particles down to rate that matched my requirements. Below is a screen grab of the final settings for the emitter, and you can specifically see that the emission speed is down to 0.01cm but still reproduces a similar visual effect that was produced by the other examples before (in Pt.1, 2 and 3).
The animation below uses the same settings provided in the screen grab, which I feel will work well for the final animation when both assets are tied together.
After identifying that the emission speed was still too high in the X-Particles ring, I set about find a way to decrease this speed whilst also maintaining the desire look.
I continued to experiement with the settings in order to slow down the particle speed but also make them retain their wide spread – Within this animation, the speed was pushed down to 2cm which I thought slowed the emission speed down drastically, however, it still looks very fast in the animation.
Conclusion
Even after decreasing the speed settings almost down to 0cm, the speed of the particles I feel is still too high – I feel that the xpSpeed setting inside of the modifer had something to do with it, possibly slightly countering the new low value settings within the emission tab. I will retest this by further decreasing the speed and decreasing the xpSpeed value as well, and if this doesn’t work then I will have to find a solution or alternative very quickly to resolve my problem. Hopefully, I will be able to take it down into 0.1cm range to have a drastic effect on it.
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.
