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Introduction

Let's take the following elements into consideration: fog, smoke, fireworks, snow, fountains, sunshine, a tennis ball bouncing off the ground. These natural phenomena and other objects taken from daily life don't seem to have anything in common except maybe that a lot of time is required to make a successful and correct animation of them.

Let's study them more closely:

  • Fog and fountain are made of fine water droplets: they are suspended in the air and more or less opaque in the case of the fog; they are projected into the air by a source and fall back with the force of gravity in the case of the fountain.
  • Sun and fireworks are respectively composed of helium, hydrogen and various chemical products. The latter are concentrated in a ball for the sun or expelled into the atmosphere in the case of fireworks.
  • Smoke is also composed of various chemical products, generating different types of smoke. As it is very light it is not subject to the force of gravity and moves with the wind. The tennis ball, however, bounces several times before coming to a standstill and the wind has little influence on it.

In each case, we deal with « particles » in the broader sense of the word: water droplets, chemical products, tennis ball, etc. These particles move and are affected by the force of gravity, the power of wind or air resistance, etc. They may bounce or come from several places at once. The place or places where the particles come from are referred to as «emitters ».

TVP Animation does not only make it possible to draw such particles but also to manage their movement using the parameters described previously. This offers considerable time saving when creating animations and other special effects (drawing and animating the particles one after the other would require months of work…).

You have understood already that it is the effect referred to as Rendering > Particles Generator which will help us succeed in this matter.

Examples​

You will very quickly notice that the particles generator is an effect which offers a wide range of options.

Generally, you need to learn how to set :

  • the parameters of the world (or universe) in which the particles will move: wind, gravity, collision…
  • The parameters of the particle emitter(s): movement, angle, rotation…
  • The particle parameters: life span, velocity, number, opacity…

The multitude of parameters is so vast that it may discourage the beginner. For this reason and for didactic purposes, numerous pre-defined examples have been included in this program to help you master this powerful drawing tool.

Many users use them as a model to introduce the particles into their own creations. These pre-defined examples, sometimes referred to as presets, are accessible via the Bin FX menu.

The Bin FX menu appears as illustrated opposite: You are already familiar with the functions Add, Load and Save: they are present for each effect available in TVP Animation. However, the functions Browse and Presets are new.

Choosing Browse opens a window that is specific to the particles generator (see below).

In the popup menu you may choose a pre-defined example from the following categories: cartoon, misc, nature, objects, party, pyrotechnic, sci-fi, text, water. (Using the ▼ and ▲ buttons you may scroll from one example to another.)

When you have chosen an example, its name will appear in the header of the popup menu and you may observe the changes made to the particle system directly in the window.

Two boxes may be checked in order to improve the quality of the particle animation depending on the power of your computer: Full Quality and AAliasing.

If a pre-defined example is close to the result you wish to obtain for your project, you may choose to set the parameters of the particles generator according to this example. To do this, just click on the Copy to FX button then close the window above. Now you study the example in detail and modify it to your needs. We will come back to this process to illustrate some situations.