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2a. Particle System Properties

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isathar edited this page Mar 14, 2015 · 4 revisions

Edit the properties of the vector field volume's particle system to alter the way force fields affect them.

  • To do this, select the volume and go to its particle properties (in the tab below the scene outliner):

Official documentation for Blender's particle system: Link

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#####Property Effects:

######Emission:

  • Don't change anything besides Lifetime in this tab, anything else will break things

Lifetime

  • Change this if you want the particle simulation to be active for a different amount of time
  • Default = 32.0

######Cache:

  • Everything in this tab should be safe to change

The most important things here are:

Disk Cache

  • Enable this to save some memory at the expense of speed and hard drive space.

Bake/Free Bake

  • Use this to bake/reset the dynamics of the particle system to get faster and more consistent results when selecting keyframes to get velocities from
  • Also required to get Angular Velocities

######Velocity:

  • Assign starting velocities to the particle system.
  • The only settings that don't work here are Tangent and Rot

Normal

  • Amount of influence each particle's associated vertex's normal has on its velocity.

Emitter Object

  • I'm not sure about this one, but it seems to influence the velocities by the vector entered here.

Random

  • Assign a random starting velocity

######Rotation:

  • Assign a starting orientation, affect angular velocities.

  • Only two settings will do anything here:

Angular Velocity

  • The dropdown selects the type of angular velocity, the number affects its scale
  • To use angular velocity in calculations, this must be above 0.0

Dynamic

  • Toggles dynamic collisions for particles

######Physics:

  • Most important setting for the vector field's dynamics.
  • All settings that don't affect particle lifetime should be safe to edit

Useful Physics Types:

Newtonian (Default):

  • Basic physics
  • Mass and Size affect the strength of force influences

Fluid:

  • Particles act like they're suspended in a fluid volume
  • More force is required to move particles

Boids:

  • Movement based on flocking behavior
  • Can come up with some interesting patterns and noise

######Field Weights:

  • Multipliers for the strength of the effect that each type of force has on the vector field.
  • 0.0 = Disabled, >1.0 multiplies strength
  • negative values for gravity will invert it

######Force Field Settings:

  • Creates force fields from particles
  • Two types of forces can be selected

Two ways to make use of this on a vector field:

  1. Enabled on the vector field's particle system and Self Effect is enabled
  • Vector field's particles will affect each other
  1. Enabled on a particle system on a different object intersecting the vector field
  • Vector field's particles will be affected by other particle system

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Examples (WIP):

  • These will probably be included as presets in the editor in future versions.
Smoke Flow:
  1. Create a cube, resize it to at least encompass the vector field
  2. Name it something like 'Smoke Domain'
  • This is the area the smoke simulation will be confined to.
  1. Go to the cube's Physics Properties
  • Enable Smoke
  • Select Domain as the smoke type
  1. Create a Smoke Flow force field
  • (Add->Force Field->Smoke Flow for a simple point-based one)
  1. Go to the vector field volume's Physics Properties
  • Enable Smoke
  • Select Flow as the smoke type
  • Set the Flow Source to Particle System, and select it
  1. Customize settings as needed
  2. Add any forces you want to influence the smoke
  3. (Optional) Bake to cache
Basic Fluid Volume Simulation:
  • a container filled with a fluid, not Blender's rendered fluid simulation
  1. Go to the vector field's Particle Properties
  2. Change the Physics Type to Fluid
  3. Customize particle system settings:
  • by default it will be a still, thin fluid
  • Good settings for a noisy, thicker fluid:
    • Brownian: 0.25
    • Drag: 0.8
    • Damp: 0.5
    • Stiffness: 1.5
    • Viscosity: 4.0
    • Buoyancy: 0.1
  1. Add any forces you want to influence the fluid
  • Force fields will need higher strength to deal with fluid viscosity
  1. (Optional) Bake to cache

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