From the course: Particular 4 for After Effects Essential Training

Defining fluid dynamics

From the course: Particular 4 for After Effects Essential Training

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Defining fluid dynamics

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- [Instructor] In this video I want you to understand what fluids are and the different options or the different kinds of graphics you can create using fluid simulations. So we'll start with our fluids composition here in the project panel. I'll double click on the fluids comp and select my particle solid here on the timeline and then go to the effect controls panel. In there I'll go ahead and open the designer for the particular effect. Now once I'm in the designer I'll go ahead and just maximize the designer. And you'll see this is the default particle emitter but if we go to the presets button here in the upper left hand corner. Go ahead and click on that to lock that out. And if fluids aren't already open I want you to go ahead and scroll down through the different groups until you get to fluids and make sure the fluid group is open. So we'll start here in the upper left and I'll click once on aqueous. And you can see I've got a bunch of particles that are falling down from the top. And as you can see, it looks like they're flowing through water. And that's the general idea of using fluids inside of Particular. You want it to look like particles are flowing through some sort of liquid material. Now I said water earlier but it could have been something like syrup or something more viscus or it could be something less viscus. These are all settings you can adjust within fluids. Now just so you can see the wide variants within fluids, let's click on the flow grid preset. And in here you can see I've got little tiny arrows that are being created. And they are kind of flowing but it's definitely giving you a completely different feel. Now when I say fluid, I think of something like the rising bubbles preset. So I'll click on that and here you can see I've got bubbles that are rising in the middle of my composition. Now when it comes to actually manipulating or setting up fluids, you need to be in the physics sections. So I'm going to stay here in the rising bubbles preset and I'll just close my presets. And I'll scroll over to the right here. And you'll notice I have physics. And in this particular system I have a master system and I have a subsystem which is system 2. And they both have physics applied. So I'll click on my master system and click on physics, and you notice here under my physics model, this is where I can set fluid as a setting. Then once you've set fluid, you can go through the different sets of adjustments which we'll get to later in the chapter, to actually refine what it is we are actually creating. So the most important thing to remember when working with fluids is the fact that you can create multiple systems on a single layer. Let me show you what I mean by that. I'm going to go back to the presets and woops let me go ahead and lock that out. And I'll scroll down here to torus collision and I'll click once on that. And you can see I've got particles that are crashing into each other and the reason I'm telling you this is I don't want you to apply a fluid system on one layer and then create another layer and apply a particular to that and add another fluid system to that. Because that would exponentially increase your render times. If you want to create multiple fluid systems, do so all on one layer. Now you'll notice here with these elements when they crash into each other, it's taking a while for this render to actually occur. And I'll go ahead and close my presets here because I want you to notice this white line here. And notice how it's dark gray over here? This is letting me know that these frames are cached so once the play head gets to the right side here and it goes back, it's going to play significantly faster when it actually goes back through. Now when you hae multiple particle systems crashing into each other, you can actually turn the visibility of one of those systems off and just work with the one system. So here I'm going to stop playback and just go back to the beginning here. So now you can see these particles are crashing into something, but we don't necessarily know what they are. So if you want to create a fluid system where particles are bouncing off of other elements, you can't set up a bounce interaction. That is a separate physics module in and of itself. If you need fluids to actually interact with something in the scene, you need to set up a second fluid system like we've done here. And after the fact you can always turn the visibility of the other fluid system off. So remember when it comes to actually creating flowing particles that look like they're moving through water, you want to work with fluids.

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