Review NavigationPage 1Page 2Page 3

Fluids

Welcome to the X-Particles web site. The development of X-Particles v3 is in full swing and we would now like to invite users of X-Particles 2.5 to join our open beta program. The update will be delivered via the online updater, or users may download.

I've saved the best to almost last. Probably the coolest thing about X-Particles is Fluids. Before I get into things, the plugin developers are the first to admit that X-Particles is not a specialist system for high quality liquid simulations. That said, some impressive results can be achieved and considering the price of X-Particles the liquid simulations are excellent for the price. X-Particles Fluids are a SPH Fluid system. To create Fluids you check Enable Fluids on the Dynamics tab of an Emitter. You can then use a Skinner object or the X-Particles material shader to render the Fluid. Below are the settings on an Emitter's Dynamics tab. I enabled Fluids. Once that is done a whole lot more settings become available.

Dynamics tab settings - Fluids have been enabled

In next page click regular or free download and wait certain amount of time (usually around 30 seconds) until download button will appead. Click it and That's it, you're done amigo! X particles 2.5 download will begin.
X-Particles 4.0 Cinema 4D – Free Download the Latest version. X-particles is strong and vigorous particle system for 4D cinema that is made for a professional designer.

Foam / Spray - is the next section of settings. These settings are only available if Fluids are enabled above. You then have to enable Diffuse Particles and add a Spawning emitter i.e. a second emitter into the Spawn field. These settings allow you to add foam, trapped air and spray to the fluids. Great for sea water. On the Spawning emitter you'll need to (usually) check the Spawn Only option so that particles are only generated by the interaction of the fluid.

The following video by Mike Batchelor is essential viewing if you're interested in X-Particles Fluids..

X-Particles Skinner Object

The Skinner object is similar to a Metaball object except it's a lot more advanced and functional i.e. quicker and a lot more options. The C4D Metaball object is notoriously slow with anything modestly complex. Meshes can be created from an X-Particles emitter, a standard C4D or Thinking Particles emitter, or any object that has vertices (or would do if made editable, such as spline primitives). The Skinner object is perfect for creating thick gooey type liquids. You can do water and get reasonable results but I found you had to play around a lot with the Emitter and Skinner object's settings. One thing that I would like to see is some in depth tutorials on creating fluids and also how to do the materials. I couldn't get decent results like I saw with some of the example videos on Vimeo.

There's far too many settings to mention but one settings you'll almost certainly want to experiment with is the Surface Type. The default Surface Type is Hart. I found this very lumpy and preferred some of the other types that give a smoother surface. In addition there are Smoothing settings to further smooth things. For water the Fluids or Zhu-Bridson types are the best ones to use. Another interesting option is the Surface Cut and Particle Cut settings that give ability to do Boolean type subtractions using other objects. Here's an example of using the Skinner object to create thick gooey liquid. I'm using a hidden cube (with thickness) to stop the liquid poking through the red box.

Click here or on the image to play the animation (1.8mb)

Here's another example of the Skinner object. This time I'm trying to simulate sea water. I'm using the foam and spray options and pretty much using the same settings that Mike used in the tutorial just above. I recall trying to use a lite version of Realflow a number of years ago. I could never get my head around it. X-Particles Fluids as you will have seen if you watched Mike's video tutorial are easy to set up plus of course you're doing it right inside CINEMA 4D and not having to export from a third party solution. For me, the quality of X-Particles Fluids are good enough. The Developer's have also said they plan to continually improve X-Particles Fluids. Awesome!!

Click here or on the image to play the animation (12.8mb)

Notes: Caching my sea water animation took about 20 minutes and 1.7gb of cache files were generated. I rendered the scene with Team Render. Before rendering on the client could begin, 850mb of cache files had to be sent over my (wired) network to my laptop. These files took a 160.02 seconds to transfer. No way would you want to do Team Rendering over a WiFi network when rendering a X-Particles animation.

By the way, X-Particles Fluids don't have to be done inside a box like you'll often see, they can be done anywhere, it's just a convenient way to do examples using them. Here's another example, this time done by the X-Particles Developer's. Just awesome. I think most people would be more than happy with water this realistic in their animations.

Click here or on the image to play the animation (11.6mb)

X Particles 3.5

Skinner Shader

The Skinner Shader also known as the Skin Shader is a special shader that you can use on the Skinner object. It colours the Skinner object based on the particle colour. You can then mix the shader with other material settings. Typical usage is where you are using 2 or more fluid emitters and the particle colour / fluid colour is different. The Skinner blends these colours together. The following animation courtesy of Lothar Mai demonstrates this.

Click here or on the image to play the animation (2.3mb)

Constraints

Constraints are some settings found on the Dynamics tab of an Emitter. The documentation describes Constraints as:
Think of a constraint as being exactly that, a means of constraining particle movement. A constraint is like a tiny spring between particles, or between particles and a collider object. This spring can pull particles together, can stretch, and can also break.
You can see a visualization of Constraints if you turn on Display Constraints in the Display tab. When you enable Constraints the behavior of the particles is not unlike Soft Body dynamics. Naturally there are a range of options, one being Stiffness which defines how hard or soft things are or more accurately, a measure of how strong the connection is. Another setting is Break a measure of how much the connection can stretch before it breaks. 0% means that the connection will never break. 50% means that it will break when it has stretched 50% of its original length. Below is an example of Constraints. The Emitter particle speed is 0 and particles are only being emitted at the first frame.

Click here or on the image to play the animation (1.6mb)

X-Particles Tags

There are 8 X-Particles Tags. They are:

Cache - The Cache tag is used to hold cache data for cached X-Particles objects e.g. an emitter.
Collider - This tag forms part of the collision engine used in X-Particles. In order to test for collision between a particle and a scene object, the scene object must have an instance of this tag attached to it.
Freeze - This tag can be used to halt X-Particles completely at a particular frame, then restart it again. Do not confuse it with the Freeze modifier, which is very different!
Light - This tag allows you to control individual lights when using an X-Particles material to render the particles. It must be applied to the light you wish to control.
Object Link - The purpose of the Object Link tag, as its name implies, is to allow you to attach another object to the object being generated by a Generator. The tag is applied to a Generator object and you add objects into a Link field. These objects are then emitted along with the particles and in the same position but there is an Offset option to offset the object from the particle / particle object.
Skinner - This tag is created by the Skinner obj

X Particles 2.5 Free Download