NAB 2016 Rewind - Casey Hupke: VR Filmmaking and VFX Techniques

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Casey Hupke offers a deep dive into Octane in his second presentation from NAB 2016.

Casey Hupke offers a deep dive into Octane in his second presentation from NAB 2016. Casey begins with an explanation of Octane’s nodal texturing workflow and the use of the Mix node to combine multiple Octane materials. Next Casey creates a fluid simulation with Turbulence:FD and demonstrates the volume rendering options within Octane 3. Finally, Casey shows how X-Particles can be used to create a vortex.

02:43Octane Nodal Texturing / Mix Node
18:43Turbulence FD and Octane 3
37:51X-Particles Vortex

Recorded Live from NAB 2016 in Las Vegas.



- [Casey] Alrighty yeah. Hey, so thanks for showing up to the booth. I know this is day four of NAB and you guys have probably seen a lot of demos. I'm super excited to have people here today. And everyone watching on the Internet, thanks for showing up. Hello again, mom. And yeah, so on my first presentation on Monday, we went over a bunch of stuff. And if you did see it, then you're going to be jumping in at the midpoint of where we left off. If you didn't see it, it will be in the archives and it won't be exactly, it's not required knowledge for you guys to have to go about today's. Today's we're going to be going over the nodal shader system, and Octane Render, and some Octane 3 features. I will warn you, I am showing an alpha version of Octane 3, and if Cinema just crashes, don't be mad at Cinema. Just be mad at some very early implementations of some features that we're going to be going over. We're also going to be doing a whole bunch of X-Particles, and that's the stuff that I'm saving a little bit for the end because I want to give the Octane section a little bit more time to breathe, and I have some TurbulenceFD setup and process that I would like to go over as well. But yeah, my name's Casey Hupke. I'm a freelancer out of Los Angeles, and I couldn't be happier to be here. There's been an insane roster this year, and I'm very, very humbled to be considered on par with those fellows and ladies. So yeah, also thanks again Aaron for my new branding. I will go ahead and show you guys my reel. - That's my latest reel. Thanks Adam at for cutting that for me. So let's just go in and start with some texturing. One of the things that I was toting during the last presentation was how great NitroBlast and its fracturing system works in conjunction with maintaining UV relationships between what was once a parametric sphere with spherical projected textures, and what is now an object that is hundreds, if not sometimes thousands, of pieces, and how it does a very good job at keeping their UVs for their internal materials and external materials. So what I want to do is I want to make the material for our planet. Here's what the end result of our planet material sort of ends up looking like. We have this really cracky, diffuse, mixtured surface. It's hard to see all the different layers that are going into what's driving the different height values for the depth, and the bump, and the displacement in this shader itself. So what I'm going to be doing is using some solid colors so along the way you can see that we come up with this material, but when we fracture it into something that looks like this, it stays the same. And let's go ahead and start inside a...let's grab this sphere. No let's go ahead and open up a new scene file. I'm going to paste in that sphere that we just made because it's the scale that I want to work at already. And let's go ahead and let's just delete these materials and then start these materials all from scratch. So I'm going to open up a couple things just to set up our scene to work well and responsive with the Octane node graph. Let's open up Octane settings, and let's change our kernel from direct lighting to path tracing, so we can get not only access to our volume step length, which is going to come in handy when we start doing smoke shading. But it's also just a more robust kernel. By default, these settings, I don't even know what project these would be appropriate for, but let's go ahead and also open up our Live Viewer and let's go ahead and initialize that. And we're going to create an object in a texture environment, just something to provide us light. I'm going to select this tag right here and just turn the power down just a little bit. I just want to show what we have as far as lighting of a scene for right now. And then we are going to go into our settings section here. We got our GPUs on. I'm going ahead and set one of these to use as priority. And what that's going to do is set the priority of this GPU, which is currently driving our display, it's going to let it breathe a little bit while Octane's eating everything it possibly can. There's another setting thing that if you're using the node graph, this is going to be something that you want to have one. I've already turned them on. By default, it does not have auto load materials in node previews. And what that basically is going to enable us to do is, if I open up the Octane Node Editor, I like to work with it as docked right here on the side. If I create an Octane material right here, you'll notice that it drops one down in here. But if I do something like this, which is going to be something that we work with a lot in image texture, and click these two tabs there. What I just did was ask Octane to give me a node graph or two float value nodes for UV transform and projection. And it didn't create them right there, but it says that they are there. One of the reasons why I didn't do that is because I don't have auto load enabled. So if I go ahead and select this material right here, now we can see that they're in there. So this will show you an example of how we would hope it to work when we're working with it. Now that we have auto update and auto load on, I'm going to collect my image texture, and I'm going to hit UV Transform and UV Projection, and it should have linked them all for me, but I think it didn't because I didn't have this guy selected down here. Yeah, so it's just going to do nice stuff when it works. Notice at the top it does say WIP and that we are riding the lightning with Alpha 3 right now. So what can we do with this image texture? This image texture node is a vessel for us to load an irrasterized image file. To create the surface of our object, I'm going to use, I'm going to be chaining together a series of materials that will give us a kind of interesting representation of a dead planet. So let's start by loading up a bump map. The materials that I'm using are from a website called It's a pack of super high res 4K and 8K channels. You get everything from bump, to depth, to gloss, and they can all be translated into working with Octane very easily, just as easy as... I say load bump. I see the bump thumbnail load in and connected to the material. And now I have bump inside my shader. Let me apply this shader to our sphere and let's go ahead and select the material, go to the diffuse, and change the color to something. Let's go ahead and update this. And in my transform, I'm going to change my aspect ratio, because this is going to let me... I'm actually going to switch this to spherical as well, because that's going to come in handy later. Let's let it reload, and then let's play with our scale. Okay, let me get this loaded in here. It should be going through. Not entirely sure why it's not reinitializing right there. But let's just get all the images loaded up and then I'll open up the file that has the sphere already textured. Actually, let's just go ahead and open up that one, and I'll walk you through the node flow, and we'll fix it along the way if there's any issues with it. So we already have the file open with our planet and materials loaded. So let's close this and oh, take our sphere into a new file. Soul (sp) it out. Let's open up, close this. Let's open up our Live Viewer window. Let's open up our Node Editor. And one of the things we're working with really heavily here in when we want to mix to create a lot of different surfaces is the mix material node. So let me grab my mix material node. Here's our cool planet. Oh man. Of course, we've got it all broken. Got it all broken. Okay, so material one, you should be this guy right here. Okay, there we go. So now let's auto load this one. That's our mix material. Let me get active material, and let's make this big. For some reason, it's referencing both of them. But we're going to unlink this one and I'm going to show you the mix material workflow. We're going to mix the channels using a noise map. So on our sphere, I'm going to take the mix material that we have with nothing in it. The thumbnail image isn't loading up right now, but let's just throw this on top here. Let's delete all of these except for our Phong. Delete, delete, delete, throw our mix material up here. Let's delete that one too, and go inside. Now we're going to make an Octane material and an Octane material. And we're going to connect both of these into the material inputs. Let's go full screen. And let's move these over here a little bit. Let's make this connect right here, and this connect right here. And I just want to show you a simple use of mixing two materials together, and once of the reasons why I really like using the node graph to visualize what's going on. In our diffuse, I don't have to do this, but I'm going to. I'm going to create an RGB spectrum node and connect it to our diffuse channel. And I'm going to set this one to red or orange. And I'm going to set this one to like a blue. And let's go ahead and reload our scene. We're going to need an environment, so let's make a texture environment. So now we can see that we have two materials, one is this orange, and one is this blue color. And this noise, this Cinema 4D noise shader I've used is controlling the amount at which they mix. But you're not limited of just doing two of these. So in the example of the texture that I did before, I had a few different things going on. So let's go ahead and change these both to a different type. Right now, they're currently set to diffuse, so they have no glossiness, or roughness, or anything really going on that's going to be interesting. So I changed these to glossy. We're start to get some Fresnel environmental reflection going on, and some extra stuff to play with. So now let me load image texture into our, let's just do bump, and let's go ahead and path to our 4K bump. Say no, let it reload, and for some reason the image texture node is not wanting to work for me. This may be just because of the build I'm currently working on. So let's go ahead and visualize our bump map in this shader with an Octane built-in noise, and crank the contrast and gamma. It's probably also not showing up because of just the colors and the way that the scene is lit right now. It's not really important. Mainly what I want to show you guys is the process of linking and chaining together mix materials in a node view so that you're coming up with complex shaders, you can do really cool stuff. Like okay, we have our, let's call this our terrain or our land mass. And then we want to mix it again, and we want to be able to have some water. So when I created this mix material node up there in the object manager down here, or the texture manager, we got another mix material. So I'm running this chain of mix materials, and let's go ahead and replace this on our surface into here. Right now, it's just set to a float value, so we can go you're all that material or you're none of that material. But for amount, I always like to use some sort of black/white value. So what I'm going to do now is from day one, I showed you guys a website that let you procedurally generate this slide right here. It's a website. This is the website up top. It lets you create normal maps, and most importantly, if you look right here, we get an alpha channel for a continental to water divide. And you can control the gradient of that and the fall off. And when I was making all these planets for this project that we're working on, I needed to make a whole bunch of them. And I could do it with noises, and blurs, and stretches, and UV projections, but just the fact that there was already something available that made it for me, I was like, "Why not just use the tool available? There's no reason for me to reinvent the wheel." I do not have the next spinning rims on my roadmap, so I wasn't going to play with it. So I'm going to load this image texture. Inside here, we have surface mix map. Let's go ahead and let this one move. So now we have this continental surface terrain that I created using that website that now is cutting through what we just defined as our noisy surface. So if we go back to our noise and...let's make this bigger, and play with our brightness and our contrast, maybe our scale of the noise. We can control those two colors and get something really interesting. We can have one of them be glossy and one of them be diffuse, or one of them be transparent entirely, and just have a transparent texture flowing through. And now, we're still missing one more material. So what we can do is create another Octane material, and again, inside of our material palette, we're going to see a new Octane material appear. And I'm going to go ahead and move some of these nodes down over here. I'm going to take this Octane material and put it into the top channel, and for this one, I'm going to show you an example. I'm going to use a specular shader. The specular shader is more or less the transparent shader, or the glass refractive. So if we move around, we can see now that we have some nice holes in our material. So when you're designing things like if you're trying to save some geometry in your scene, you want to do things like lamps, or windows, or stained glass, this is often how I'll do stuff like that. I'll have just a few layered mix shaders. And the important thing is I'm really showing you how to make like a revolutionary, amazing looking texture here, but the proof of concept is that by following this pretty easy to follow flow, like okay, he has this one, this one mixing with this mat into this, you can kind of really start to move up into the progressiveness of the quality of detail you have in your shading. And I really wanted to show this primarily because it was something that a lot of users that I've been working with lately in Cinema 4D and Octane, they don't use the node graph because in Cinema, we're not really node based artists in general. Like we have Espresso and earlier in the previous demonstration, I did show you guys how to do some stuff in Espresso, but it was a very small amount of nodes. And when you're working with Octane's nodal material system, the cool thing is you can always go back to the regular channel and show on manager, go into that one, and use the regular layer based system. And you see on the side that every time I open these, I'm getting an independent node version. And as I make things in the nodes, it's creating it one to one in both worlds. So my feeling was why not use these nodes? They're a very easy, visual flow to dive into. And all right. So the next thing that I want to do, and this may be even more daring, is show a little quick setup for how to work with TurbulenceFD volumes and the new volume gradient in Octane 3. So what I'm going to do is just create a quick little scene. Let's go Live Viewer, and I'm going to put this Live Viewer right here next to us. And I'm going to create a platonic. Let's go ahead and solo in on that. Any piece geometry, it'll work for this, but sphere just seemed like...just over them. Just so many spheres. I'm going to give this guy a TurbulenceFD emitter tag. And I'm also going to give it a C4D Octane object tag. And the Octane object tag is going to auto-magically create a... Oh actually no. That's where I want it at all. I'm going to make a TurbulenceFD container, and then I'm going to put a Cinema 4D object tag. And that's going to automatically create this particle rendering tab for me, and it's going to allow me to control the way the particles inside the voxel grid are rendered. So we're going to need to do a sim. So let's go ahead and really make these Quadros sing. Let's go ahead and we'll...there is an SSD on here I believe. Let me just double check that I'm not going to overfill the C drive with doing a sim. Okay, so the C drive is a terabyte SSD. Whenever you're working with things like TurbulenceFD or X-Particles, you're going to be working with caches a lot. And caches need to be read on a frame by frame basis. So if you're working off of a 5,400 RPM hard drive, and you're using that as your cache directory because, well, it's an 8 terabyte drive, and my caches are like 20 or 30 gigs, I like to rather delete caches along the way and not save them to have to go back to them. I rather think of a better workflow, like saving all your files with a name that is descriptive to the things that you changed, rather than keeping around 40 gigabyte files, and having an SSD on your computer that you can cache your files to. Because you're going to notice and FPS change in your view port immensely just because of read/write time to disk. So let's go ahead, I'm going to make a new folder here and call this NAB_TFD_Octane3testAlpha9. And this is going to be our path. So I'm going to go ahead, I think I'm already browsing to the path, yep. So paste this into here, select this folder, and I'm going to create a new path. If you ever want to do something like add vect particles, or have the particles be pushed around by the fluids, you want to cache the velocities, it's going to increase the size of your cache by quite a bit, so for this, and for speed, we're not going to do that. But let's go ahead, increase the size of our volume container. The one centimeter size of our megavoxels is quite large. For sim time and for ease of use, we are going to increase that. You can, when you're rendering with TurbulenceFD, you can do things like cache velocity, and then up-res the simulation to get even finer detail. But Octane doesn't really see that because during the process, and let's go ahead and just do some simulation settings really quick so we have an interesting sim to work with, and I'll talk about... So Turbulence intensity, I'm going to make this pretty big because when we blow up, when I blow up my planets, the planets themselves are about 1,200 centimeters, so the Turbulence intensity needs to be rather large, so then I can then play with the... I like to do things at larger integers at first, so then I can see like, "Okay, well that was what happened at 1,000. I feel like I could probably get away with 2." But I do like to see things dramatically and quickly, like I'll often change timescale to a much higher than needed value just so I can see things happen quicker. So for larger size, I'm going to set an arbitrary value of 156, and for small size, I'm going to set another arbitrary value of 29. Well that's arbitrary, that's my wife's favorite number. And then in vorticity, I'm also going to give it some vorticity. And vorticity, whenever you see smoke, like burning from incense or burning from a cigarette, or a candle, or just a fire, whenever you see wafts of smoke start doing these tendrils and curls, this vorticity value is going to be the integer that's multiplied by the small power in TurbulenceFD. There's a whole bunch of really, really well done TurbulenceFD tutorials. I'm only mentioning the surface of what these settings were doing. So if this interesting to you, I definitely recommend looking up like, Ben Watts did an amazing one on TurbulenceFD. I've done talks in the past on Turbulence, but let's give this a value of 12. Again, probably bigger than it needs to be. I'm going to have temperature on, and I'm going to have density on, because I want to use both of those to control different things in my sim. I'm going to set both of these to a value of three and three, and I'm going to give it some pressure. This pressure is going to be used to push the fluids away from the surface a little faster. Again, just stuff to get us data to work with And for the texture, for the volume texture, I'm going to use a C4D noise, and I'm going to click right here. Oh, I don't need that, I want the actual text input. I'm going to use gaseous because we're trying to actually make a gaseous simulation. Let's go ahead and scroll this up here. Let me check the time. Oh, doing good. All right, turn the brightness down, and the contrast up a little bit. All right, cool. And now, let's go ahead and save this file just in case we crash, because it can happen. Day two, TFD, and let's open up our simulation window. I'm going to choose our Quadro that is currently not driving the display. I'm going to set my container voxel size up to three for now, and let's see how that works. Let's hit start. So TFD's insanely fast. It uses the GPU and CUDA to kind of generate, not kind of generate, to physically represent and render what we're creating. So yeah, this sim is wild. This is our veritable roaring fire. And it went really quick, so I'm going to go ahead and actually lower this to one, and let that Quadro go nuts. Maybe too ambitious with one for purposes of saving time. All right, one is too many. Two, you can use floats in there. You don't have to use hard integers. But I don't like working with values like 1.3 and 1.7, and other such non-whole numbers. I prefer working with whole numbers just to avoid anything. For some reason, I always feel like remainders and decimals are things that cause programs to fault. I have no grounds for that statement, so someone on the internet right now is watching is going, no! It's factually inaccurate. Okay, cool. So now we have a 90 frame cache of a platonic just getting wild with fire, and density, and smoke. So let's go to, let's find an interesting frame here. This one's kind of cool because we have some smoke that's dissipating here. We have a really hot, fiery core. And it'll let me show you guys how to do smoke and fire in our simulation. Since I changed my voxel size to two here, one thing that Octane is really smart about doing is setting the voxel size correctly when you apply the tag. Thanks Ahmed, actually Ahmed, big shout out from the Cinema 4D community, on behalf of myself, for doing an amazing job developing this plug-in for us. A lot of us are very happy with your work. Thank you, buddy. So I'm going to go ahead and create a new Octane object tag, and you're going to notice that the voxel size is set to two. It's correctly interpreted. You cannot super-sample your sim by simulating in TurbulenceFD at a 5 voxel size and then set your Octane render size to 1, or 2, or 0.5. That will do nothing but slow your machine down and make your render take a lot longer. You will see no visual change. I know this because I tried this. Okay, so now let's create an HDR environment, and I'm going to use an image texture inside the HDR environment, and I'm going to use this HDR of the Milky Way, just because it's stars and I like it. And I'm also going to create a couple objects here, an Octane Arealight. And okay, let's just send this to the GPU. So right off the bat, we have a lot of fire, but we're not seeing a lot of smoke. So there are some things within our rendering. Right now also, I'm using the commander. You guys aren't aware what is coming up. I'm hitting Shift C to search through every possible thing that's in Cinema and get the actual one object that I want. So let's make this much smaller, and go to kernels. I'm going to change from direct lighting to path tracing, and I'm going to lower this down to 300. It's going to be noisy, but we're not going for final render right now. I'm also dropping these steps down. If I take these down to one, and one, we're not really going to have a lot of cool data to work with. So three and three is totally fine. And here was the a-ha Octane 3, four volume rendering setting that I did not know about when I first started playing around with this. And thanks Patrick and Brasco from the Motion Design Slack for working with me on this. This volume step length, this is how the GPU calculates how dense or rich the volume is, and how much it calculates, and how much it gets into based on the open VDB volume that is generating procedurally from the TurbulenceFD volume. So if I change this to one, we'll start to see...actually I think because of these Nvidia Quadros, we can actually get away with bringing our step length down quite a bit. And what it's going to do is going to give us a lot more, you can kind of see what's happening in the corner pockets right here. Let's go, let's focus on this area right here. So let's get that down here. We've got a nice range of color of black, and orange, and red, and white. But when we were much higher at one, it was very, very, very... Or actually we started at two, I think. It wasn't very great. So from the testing that a lot of us did in the 3D room on the motion design slack, we found that 0.2 was where a lot of the bounds of realistic smoke and fire lived. So now that our settings are feeling okay, we're getting some range. These two cards are actually doing a really, really good job. So I'm going to let it go and render to 600 from now on. Let's save this again. And now our Octane settings for the most part for us, let's check alpha channel. All right, we'll keep it like this. We'll keep our starry background. I'm going to close our settings since we're not really going to get into that too much anymore. I'm going to go to my Octane object tag, never really touching any of this. I am going to change my absorbance scatter channel to my density channel, which is going to give me a different level of control for when we start doing smoke. Right now, it's primarily fire. So let's go inside and look at the scattering and emission. We have in the newer builds, these things called volume gradients. The fire is being generated via texture emission, so if I hop inside of this texture channel, it's currently just using the regular color, and its power is fairly high. So if I wanted to choke it down a little bit, I could even play with surface brightness, but I don't usually do that. I can turn off Cast Illumination as well. So if you have some background flames that are going off, and you're trying to optimize and prioritize render speed in your scene, if there is no reason for your objects to be casting illumination, turn off Cast Illumination. You're still going to get the glows and stuff if you use post-effect bloom, you're still going to get the value of light. You're going to get the same sensation from the render. It's not going to affect it. But it is going to increase your render time quite a bit. I am going to change this texture to a C4D Octane RGB spectrum. And that's going to let me change the values to get different levels of control over what the color and range of the flame is. And then I can also go...once I've got my color feeling good and the power around where I want it, you can blow the power out and let the volume really become enveloped with the emission, but we don't really want that. So I'm just going to turn this down a little bit, just so we have a core level of flame to work with. And then I'm going to go back into our volume gradient, and this is where we can control, again, our color. And this slider right here, this Max Value slider, I wish I could explain it in a way that made sense as a cinema artist, but you can kind of imagine it like a slider to control an FCurve, if that makes sense. Like if you're using an FCurve, like a Bézier curve, and you clamped the levels down to only accentuate the blacks in a gradient or range, or then lofted it way around to go the other way around, this is lets you isolate key areas of the gradient within the volume. So if we look at these greens and reds that exist over here in our object manager, we can play with the max value to control where our flame lives in regards to our volume. And we're going to do this same thing with... I'm actually going to clear this out of here, and I forgot that we're using the volume medium over there. We can give this a little bit of power back. And let's go back to our volume gradient and just play with this so we have a nice clamp. Because we want to have, like in the flames, we want to have those really nice dark and black, and really fractal-ey sections. And then now, let's go into controlling our smoke. Oh, also density is very important, so if we bring this up to, say, volume 11, we can get a much more dense amount of fluid that we can then, again, go back in and adjust our power to bring it down. Everything in this extra fall off range is what's going to be functioning as our smoke. So let's go ahead and go into our scattering ramp. And the scattering ramp is going to function exactly the same as our emissive ramp. We're going to C4D Octane, and use a volume gradient. And then we can control the scattering for the smoke. For now, let's save this, and let's turn off the temperature. And let's go ahead and put something less than black. If you have true 000 black, which I believe that everyone that's ever given a visual effects discussion in any room, if there is no true black in a scene and there is no true white in a scene, so you should almost never have a scene that's set up like that. Oh, and I'm using Octane's Color's Chooser just because I didn't change it. I actually really like Cinema's Color Picker, and I would prefer to use that in Octane right now. But okay. So I'm going to give this a grey value to let the smoke. And this is when the renders are going to really start becoming a little bit more on the heavy end. And we're going to hop back up. Scattering functions, very similar to the way that the volume emissions functioned. So let's turn this around here to where I have access to this really cool, thick section. And then I'm going to go to my Octane Arealight and I'm going to turn off normalize because it doesn't work the way that it should work. And I'm going to change the temperature because it's too moody. And then in visibility, I'm going to turn off camera visibility so we don't see it anymore, and I'm going back to my light settings, and I'm going to increase the power a little bit just so we can see it punching through the smoke a little bit more, get a little backlight action going on here. Let's find a nice range in the gradient so we can play with the scattering. I'm just going to turn that on so I can see what the progress is at. All right, so let's go back to our object volume, dive into this, and just like before, the max value. We can tweak this down to get our scattering affecting the outer edge of our smoke, or we can clamp it way up here to drive in and grab more of that wispiness. And yeah, so that's a basic start of volume rendering with TurbulenceFD in Octane 3 and Cinema 4D. So I'm going to close this now because I just got the 10 minute warning, and there's some X-Particles stuff that I wanted to show you guys. So in our original scene that we had, we had this...and let's open up my reference file so we don't have to build the whole thing and we can just talk about making a cool vortex, and having objects change from one position to the other. So let's open the file, paste everything in here, and what we set up on our first day was these two torus objects that were going to act as the basis of our vortex for us to emit particles from. Something that I like to remind is that you can benefit a lot in your scene and in your design process by using basic pieces of geometry to place things in your scene where you inevitably want them to look much better. Previous artists are a huge aspect to any VFX pipeline, and they really help sell an effect through. So a lot of the times, I'll work with regular Cinema 4D objects and deformers, just to get the base level of undulation and movement that I want from my systems. All right, and now let's look at our setup. So this setup right here, this base system that I've created, what I'm doing here is I'm creating... Hey, what are you doing? Let's turn this one off. So what's happening here is I'm having a regular emitter. Let's turn off all our modifiers and let's turn off our generator. And let's just see this play out. Let's turn off the sprites too, and let's make this to a visibility of something that's a better color. Actually the generator's going to come in handy here. Why it's not, oh they're so small. This is not the one I had prepped for this. So let's bring these torus objects down to a smaller scale just for the purposes showing this vortex that inevitably would be the driving force of everything. So right now, it's just emitting all these little chunks. And one of the cool things that X-Particles has inside of it is a generator that creates rubble. And the rubble's really, really cool. It's great for creating little extra bits of detail in your scene. It comes in the flavor of the sprite object. My scene's getting a little slow because I am generating whole bunch of them at random with a lot of subdivision levels. But you get these little, what I can only refer to as like noisy space greebles, that are basically a whole bunch or parametric objects within Cinema that emit and take on their own form, and add a little bit of extra detail. I'm then using an XP scale modifier to have them scale up from being born, and then scale down over life, just so they eventually go out of their scene on their own. And then I'm adding a little bit of turbulence, and then I'm adding an XP vortex modifier, which is going to basically take over everything and start spinning them and sucking them back. Let me show you what the XP vortex modifier is doing on its own system. It's a really, really cool modifier and it has a very specific use. It came in really, really handy for me for creating a vortex. I don't know if anyone remembers or has seen a demonstration that I did of X-Particles 2.5 years ago at Siggraph, but it was creating a vortex without this modifier. So one reason why I wanted to return to this was just because of how powerful it is. So it immediately starts creating and generating a vortex. And if you don't prefer my voice talking about this, down here inside of X-Particles, you can click on this little guy and it will open up a video tutorial, and you can hear the Mike Baxter's voice to tell you exactly what I'm about to tell you. So hit F8, and this vortex is great. It's going to let us use a spline curve to control the shape in a 2D represented silhouette of our spline curve. So we can use all these splines to control and manipulate the way our vortex is going to spiral out. I've already done a bunch of scene changes in our vortex file up here. So let's just go ahead and turn these back on. I need to give a bunch more frames here. And this is going to be moving wildly fast, because I have everything's timing increased because I was hoping to move faster to get to this point. So I'm going to turn off our base system up here and I'm going to turn our toruses, just so we can see the way these particles are sucking down inside of the system. And one of the things that I did in our base system originally up here at the top is our generator and our sprites creating the rubble, we did what we just did on the platonic, was basically the testing ground for how I wanted the rubble to be generated inside here. So I had turbulence fluids emit from all these little popcorn sprites and sucked down, and get us to what looks like...this is about 300 sample version of it, but basically all the smoke and stuff spiraling back into the vortex and using the TurbulenceFD sim to advect the particles. Thanks for coming, guys.
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