15 Excellent Particle Flow Animations

If you’d like to learn how to create such particle flow animations you may start learning right away with particle flow tutorials we’ve already published! Below I’ve listed some of them. They are perfect for beginners and moderate particle flow users! Check them out!

• Create an Awesome Sci-fi 3D Tunnel Effect in 3ds Max
• Create a Retro Rainbow Waterfall Using 3DS Max and Particle Flow
• Create Audio Sensitive Animation
• Create a Colorful Apple Wallpaper
• How to Create a Stylish Retro Illustration
• Particle Dispersion Effect Using 3DS Max and Particle Flow
• Create an Exploding 3D Fluid Text Effect

By following the links above you’ll find some useful and creative ways of using particle system. Go ahead and try them now!

Final Image Preview

Here is the image we are going to create:

Step 1

Open up your 3ds Max (or your favourite 3D application that you’re familiar with). Create lots of boxes like me by going to ‘Create -> Standard Primitives -> Box’. Their placement is random but they are quite close to each other. Each one has 154mm length and 10mm width. Their height is different for each box but they are all high.

Step 2

Now you place some cameras around. It’s hard to exactly specify where to put them. I created several ones around the boxes. Below are some examples. I believe all of them would work well but I decided to choose third camera (Camera02) for final render so try to position one of your cameras like Camera02.

Step 3

I used V-Ray to render this scene with resolution set to 1280x800px. In its settings I only turned on GI (Irradiance Map + Light Cache with standard settings) and skylight (with pure white color) as well as ‘Reflection/refraction environment override’ under ‘V-Ray:: Environment’. Below are the settings for material. Once you’ve got everything set up hit render.

Step 4

Open up the Photoshop and create a new document with dimensions set to 1280x800px. Fill the background layer with black using Paint Bucket Tool (G). Paste your render and rotate it by 180 degrees.

Step 5

Paste a desaturated texture of sheet of paper below the layer with render and lower its opacity to about 25%.

Step 6

Duplicate your render and go to ‘Filters -> Blur -> Box Blur…’ to blur it. You should obtain this kind of effect:

Step 7

Now create a new layer and paint some huge colorful dots like on the image below.

Step 8

Again, use ‘Box Blur…’ with fairly high radius to blur these dots. Then duplicate blurred layers and set them to ‘Color’ and ‘Overlay’.

Step 9

Now turn on the layer with the original render and set it to ‘Linear Dodge (Add)’. Move it beneath the layers with colors but above paper layer. Also, add in some little dots on a new layer using Brush Tool (B).

Step 10

Finally, you may create a layer like the one below and set it to ‘Screen’. It was created from the same render but I blurred it slightly and changed its color to red using ‘Hue/Saturation…’.

Conclusion

That’s all for now! I hope you enjoyed my tutorial!

Magic Tree Illustration

Here is what you are going to create.

Step 1: 3ds Max Plug-in

First we will use 3ds Max and then Adobe Photoshop for this tutorial. In order to complete this tutorial you will need a plug-in for 3ds Max called Glu3D or similar plug-in. It has a demo version available on 3DAliens website so you may use it or you may create a mesh that looks like a fluid yourself. Open up 3ds Max. Go to ‘Create Tab -> Geometry -> glu3D pouring system’ and choose glu3D.

Step 2: Calculating the Scene

Don’t change anything and calculate the scene (select ‘glu3D text’ and hit ‘GO!’).

Step 3: Surface

Afterwards turn on glu3D toolbar and hit ‘Build surface’ and then ‘Hide/Show mesh surface in viewport and render’. Delete the bowl.

Step 4

Take a look at the glu3D settings for your mesh. Increase level of detail, drop size and decrease your drop size. Add a modifier called ‘TurboSmooth’ to your mesh. It should instantly start to resemble a branch of my tree from the final image.

Step 5

Go to material editor (M) and select a standard material. Use ‘Swirl’ for diffuse channel. Apply this material to your fluid and try to render it. Most likely it won’t look like mine one so try to play with the settings visible on screenshot below inside ‘Swirl’.

Step 6

Take a look at my examples. Your goal is to make it look like the second one. It’s all about playing with the settings I mentioned about above. I’m unable to specify them exactly because you’ll simulation will be different anyway. I used quite high level of detail (like 14) and 3 or 4 iretations for TurboSmooth. Then I was moving time slider back and forth to capture a good moment. I didn’t have to change anything inside ‘Swirl’ for most renders because it looked fine already.

Step 7: Moving to Photoshop

Go to Photoshop and create a new document with dimensions set to 1680 x 1050px. Fill the background layer with black using ‘Paint Bucket Tool (G)’. Move your renders to the Photoshop and use their alpha masks to get rid of their background. If you have some photo of a tree then you may use here. Otherwise go to any stock website and download one. My comes from cgtextures.com (browse their nature category). Place your tree in the middle of the image and get rid of its background if it has it. Also descrease its size a bit (Ctrl/CMD + T).

Step 8

Start placing your renders beneath the crown of a tree. Again, also here I can’t provide you a good solution on how to do it because your renders are different than mine ones. Just use your imagination.

Step 9

To recolor your objects simply go to ‘Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Hue/Saturation…’ and use any colors you like.

Step 10

Use your brush tool with colors set to light yellow and dark green or blue to paint something like on the image below. I also used some grunge textures in the background with very low opacity. Paint each part of your background on a separate layer and use gaussian blur to make them smoother.

Step 11

After that paint a few little dots near the tree and try to adjust your image using adjustment layers if you consider it necessary. You may also add in some other elements that I didn’t mention about like clouds or fruits on a tree.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed my tutorial! Please comment it below.

IPhone version is available. Download all the files below.

Final effect

Tunnel Tutorial – 3ds Max and After Effects parts

Adobe After Effects plug-ins used in the tutorial:

• The Foundry – Tinderbox
• Red Giant Trapcode Particular
• Videocopilot – 3D Orbit

Final image preview

Step 1

Open up 3DS Max and go to Particle Flow View (6). Create a Standard Flow and replace a “Shape” with “Shape Instance”.

Step 2

Create a box that is 2m long, 0.1m wide and 0.1m high. Add an “Edit Poly” modifier to it and move four vertices on one side of your box a bit forward to create something like on the image below.

Step 3

Let’s now change Rotation’s “Orientation Matrix” from “Random 3D” to “Speed Space Follow”. Use 90 for Z axis. After that go to “Birth” event and change the “Emit Stop” to 220 and the “Amount” to 2000. Then go to “Shape Instance” and use your box from the previous step as a “Particle Geometry Object”.

Step 4

Make your PFlow wider and duplicate it. Place it like on the image below. You can also use “Find Target” operator and two mesh objects that will act like they are targets. Both methods works similar but the first one is just quicker.

Step 5

The last thing is to set up a camera. Try to place it as That’s how it should look like afterwards.

Step 6

Now let’s switch to VRay rendering engine and render your scene with resolution set to 1280x800px. I used VRay Sky with standard settings and a default VRayMtl with darker grey. This is what I got after rendering the scene:

Step 7

Now move to the Photoshop and create a new document that has 1280x800px. Fill the background layer with black using Paint Bucket Tool (G).

Step 8

Cut out your shape from the render using its Alpha channel. You should be familiar with how to cut it out if you’ve read my previous tutorials so I’m not including the full instruction here. Pase it into the main document. Add a Gradient Overlay to it with the following settings.

Step 9

Duplicate it and use a “Motion Blur” with angle set to -90 degress and a distance set to something like 60 pixels. Move this layer below the previous one and erase its edges if they create some kind of a glow (we don’t need it).

Step 10

Background is a bit more complicated. First I rendered the scene using the top view. Then I started to draw some huge dots with the brush and the color set to green and blue on a separate layers. I set the first layer to “Soft Light” and the second to “Normal” but with opacity decreased to 30%.

Step 11

Finally, I decided not to use the shape from the previous step but I did something similar instead. Press CTRL/CMD and click on the layer with the rendered shapre visible from the top. Once it’s selected click on the layers from the previous step and use this selection as their mask. That should give you a nice effect like on the image below.

Step 12

After that repeat the two previous steps to create other parts of the background. You may want to use some additional textures to make the background more interesting. Once you turn on all the layers you’ve created you should see something similar to the final image. Most likely it will require some Brightness/Contrast tweaks and I’ve also added some little shiny particles in the background. I’ve also created a new layer with clouds (Filter -> Render -> Clouds…) and set it to overlay with decreased opacity.

Conclusion

That’s all. I hope you enjoyed it! If so, you may check my other tutorials or visit this site often to see even more in the future! Click on the image below to see it in the full size.

Scene Concept

In the original concept this scene was meant to look differently but as I started simulations and rendered some test images I decided to simplify it a bit because it would take days to create what I really wanted to with 1-core 1,8GHz processor that I was working on that moment. Anyway, original idea was to create some text filled with paint that is slowly running out of each letter and flies away. I’ve ended up with wavy water exploding from each letter so it’s slightly different but still looks cool .

A new scene

Open up 3ds Max. First let’s create some text so go to the Splines and look for Text. I suggest to use some bold and clear font because it will be much easier to create water pouring from the letters’ faces. Some good fonts include Arial, Helvetica, Futura, Adobe’s Myriad so choose one of them.

Text Setup

We’ll need three or more different objects for text. Spline from the previous step is just a beginning.

• First one is just a flat text will Extrude applied to it that will be used to create particles in front of the actual letters (so place it like this on the scene).
• Second has Bevel applied to it and the outline set to five. We will use it as the border of each letter.
• The last one is a regular text with Bevel applied to it. This one will be the center part of each letter. (place it inside the second text object).
• At this point you can plan how should your text look like and add more layers if you want it to be different (for instance you can add another border or round some edges).

Placement

You should now have something similar to this scene on the image below. Place the second object inside first but let it stick out a bit and the third object in front of the first and the second.

Glu3D – Fluid Plug-in

To create a realstic fluid we’ll use Glu3D plug-in for 3ds Max. If you don’t own one you can download a demo version on 3daliens website. After installation restart 3ds Max and it should work. The last thing is to right-click somewhere in the 3ds Max’s toolbars and enable glu3D toolbar.

Setting Up Particle Flow

Select the thinest word and apply a material with opacity set to 0 to it. After that go to Particle View (6). Create an Empty Flow, Birth Event and add in all the necessary elements like Position Object, Force, Shape, Age Test. At the end create pFlow -> Glu3D operator that should be now available for you. If not your plug-in doesn’t work and you should reinstall it or turn it on manually by going to Customize -> Plug-in Manager.

Particle Flow Forces

Create a wind and a drag by going to Space Wraps -> Forces in the top-right menu of your 3ds Max. The settings really depends on what you are going to do with this effect. If you don’t want to have as wavy water as mine just decrease turbulence a bit. My setting for wind are 0.05 for strength, 0.4 for turbulence, 0.4 for frequency and 0.5 for scale. In the drag’s settings I’ve only changed Linear Damping values from five to 25 for each axis.

Particle Flow Settings

Back to Particle View (6). I’ve prepared a screenshot that contains all the setting used there so just modify them. They are close to standard setting but we’ve increased a number of particles to 20,000 because Glu3D will need lots of them (maybe even more) to create a detailed fluid. We’ve also changed the emit stop parameter from 30 to 10 and that will make these 20,000 particles appear on the scene during first 10 frames of the animation. We’ve obviously added forces (drag and wind) to particle system and we’ve added our invisible text as a Particle Emitter. There’s also a Destination Directory parameter in pFlow -> Glu3D options. I suggest not to change it yet and I’ll explain what to do with it in the further part of this tutorial.

Other settings

Our scene should look like on the image below. Note how I’ve placed the wind. It’s rotated a bit upwards (like 10 degrees) because we don’t want particles to fly straight horizontally but rather fly off the surface first and than start to fly to the right.

Converting particles to Glu3D fluid particles

When I was starting to write this tutorial I didn’t know how to use particles from 3ds Max’s particle flow inside Glu3D and I found a short solution on 3Dalien’s forum which works fine. You can find the solution here: http://www.3daliens.com/glu3D/forum2/index.php?topic=574. Anyway, I’ve prepared the condensed version:

1. Click “Select destination” from the pFlow -> Glu3D options panel and select a folder to store your particle flow files.
2. Create a Glu3D system but delete its emitter and press play button (or GO).
3. Make sure some new files appeared in the destination folder and create a glu3d emitter.
4. In the emitter’s options select source type as “import from PFLOW” and choose the directory you’ve recently created.
5. Press play button.
6. Press “Build Surface from the start of the playback range” button in the glu3D toolbar and you are done.

Materials

Material for borders of the letters is just VrayMtl with diffuse set to white.
Second one for fluid is a bit more complicated. There are several different ways you can create water material so feel free to use your own material. My material looks like this on the image below.

Vray rendering engine setup

It’s a simple scene so I believe you can render it with any rendering engine with similar results but I prefer to use Vray. The settings are very close to the original ones but I’ve turned off default lights and used HDRI instead. I’ve got a little library of HDRI maps so I just picked one. You can download some free HDRI maps from the Internet and use them here if you don’t have any. Click on the screenshot to enlarge.

Rendering

At the end render your scene. I rendered only three letters at first with resolution set to 640x480px. Then I did the same with the next two letters and finally I rendered “.com” part of my image. Save your renders and alpha maps for them.

Background

Create a 1920x1200px Photoshop document and fill it with black with Paint Bucket Tool (G).

Compositing Fluid

Paste your renders into Photoshop and get rid of thier background. I used Alpha Maps to cut the letters out of the image. If you aren’t sure how to do it simply visit my previous tutorial about 3D space explosion and look for heading called “Cutting These Things Out” which explains entire process.

Sky

Sky can be created by simply using Brush Tool (B) or Gradient Tool (G). For the colors use some light shades of blue like #8bcff6 or #439cdf. You can also download a clear sky image and blur it a lot by going to Filter -> Gaussian Blur… I’ll leave it up to you.

Water

Water was rendered in Vue Infinite but even if you don’t add any water to your image it will look good anyway.

Adjustments

I made several adjustments by modifying color, contrast, brightness etc. of the image. There’s no one firm solution on how to do it so just play with the setting all the time. I hope that it won’t be a problem to adjust your image.

Finishing Touches

At the end you can paint some clouds or add some text to it. To paint clouds I used free cloud brushes from here: http://redheadstock.deviantart.com/art/Clouds-II-Photoshop-Brushes-91356293 (by the way this is my favourite pack of all cloud brushes and I’m sure it will be useful for you as much as it’s useful for me also in other projects). Each cloud is on separate layer and the background clouds’ layer has its opacity set to 15%.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading it and if you liked it please give it a vote on Digg or other website below. The next tutorial is coming next week. If you’d like to be notified when it’s published just subscribe to an RSS feed!

Concept

There are lots of similar animations on the Internet but I couldn’t actually find a good tutorial that is explaining how to create effect like this so here you can find one. First let’s take a look at the final animation and a sample screenshot from the middle of the movie.

Usage

That’s what we are going to create but before we start I’d like to point out some possible methods of creating this effect that I’m familiar with and some situations where you may find it useful. Effects like this one are usually very basic stuff and at the same time they have a wide usage anytime when you want to:

• dissolve,
• explode,
• burn,
• destroy,
• hide,
• and more…

something in a quick, simple and believable way. You can do it using different techniques and some examples include:

• using modifiers such as “delete mesh”
• using plug-ins like RayFire that are affecting object’s mesh
• using materials that are not affecting mesh but making object invisible.

Here I will show you the third method because that one works best for me and is probably the best one in most cases, especially, when it doesn’t have to be perfect. Also it’s probably the quickest one to do and it gives you relatively the best results. So, of course you don’t have to play with all your mesh because it is much more complicated, time consuming and hard to calculate on average computer that you are probably working on at the moment, than if you had to use particles that are in a matter of fact made for such things. We won’t even touch our object (excluding a need of selecting it occasionally) but we will hide it using materials instead and let particles simulating sand appear in the correct place and time.

Step 1 – Objects to disperse

Open up your Max and create some kind of an object. I chose teapot because it is more complex and has more details than other objects. It doesn’t really matter if it’s big or small. I used 40 centimeters for radius so I was playing with quite big teapot . Don’t forget that size does matter if you are going to render your scene. Some rendering engines works better if you keep real world dimensions.

Step 2 – Setting Up Particle Flow

Once you’ve done that turn on Particle View window. Usually it’s under 6 hotkey so you only have to hit 6 right after you’ve made teapot but if it doesn’t work go to Graph Editors -> Particle View in the top menu of your 3ds Max. Right click in the window that will appear and create Empty Flow (under Particle System section). Then create Birth right next to that and connect them together (find part of table that makes your mouse cursor like 3 arrows pointing to the center and drag and drop this part of your table on the top of another).

Step 3 – Modyfing Particle Flow

We have to modify a list of items by adding there some new objects. Right-click again and add Position Object, Force and Shape from a list.

• Position Object – because we want to add our teapot (or whatever you are using) to a system
• Force – because we want to add wind (otherwise particles won’t fly away)
• Shape – because we want to see particles on renders

We have to modify all of them slightly before we can go any further but first let’s add one more thing to our scene.

Step 4

Go to Space Warps, choose Forces and then Wind. Place it somewhere on your scene. Again it can be either big or small as you wish because it doesn’t make any difference except it’s easier to find in viewports. I made it around 10 meters. Rotate and move it a bit so that it has direction in which you want your particles to fly. You can also make it falling ground but in this tutorial I’ll only cover flying.

Once you have your wind you can modify its setting. I found that standard wind’s strength is too high so it’s good idea to decrease it a little bit. Also you’ll probably want to add some turbulence to it so that it won’t go perfectly straight. Try to change other settings here if you won’t satisfied when we’ll be able to see the result (we can’t yet).

Step 5

Go back to Particle View and select Position Object. Add your teapot to Emitter Objects list.

Step 6

Now choose Force and obviously you have to add there your forces. In our case there is only wind.

Step 7

Go to Display and choose there your particles’ color as well as their type. I decided to make them look like a sand so I think Dots and yellowish color will be great.

Step 8

Now select Shape and decrease its size a lot like for example to 1cm or 2cm.

Step 9

Go to the Birth and change Emit Stop to something bigger like 50 and Amount to something really high. I think 20,000 would be enough for now but for the final renders you’ll probably need to increase this number to around 100,000 (depending on how many particles you need). Finally we can close that and get back to viewports and our teapot. Animation is already there. Maybe values I chose are not good for you but always you can play with them as you like. Now it’s good time for that. If it slows down your computer don’t worry. You can go to your PE Source settings and look for Quantity Settings. Decrease Viewport % a bit and it will show less particles in your viewport but still they will be visible on your renders.

Step 10

We can get back to our teapot again. We want it to disappear and that can be done using gradient ramp as an opacity map. Opacity slot as many others works that way it grabs value from color of any grayscale map and make your objects more or less transparent. For instance, if you will put there black bitmap it will be invisible all the time because black has value of 0. Go to Material Editor (M) and select one of the material slots. Select opacity slot and then change it from NONE to Gradient Ramp.

Step 11

Basically what we want to achieve is animated material which will make teapot disappear while there are particles flying around. We need to animate gradient and make it change from white at the beginning to black at the end during 100 frames. It’s a bit complicated process. Try to even set key frames for already set indicators (colors)(for instance if indicator is already white set it white again anyway when you move it to another position). Turn the Set Key mode on and go to the 1st frame.

1. Frame: 1 – 1% indicator set to black and rest white at positions 2%, 3% and one at 100%
2. Frame: 2 – 1% and 2% indicators set to black and rest white at positions like before (remember to change their color to the same color here even if they already have this color – this will make key frame)
3. Frame: 98 – move indicators from 2% and 3% to accordingly 98% and 99% (1% indicator is black and 2% indicator is white all the time)
4. Frame: 99 – 99% indicator set to black and rest black but 100% is still white
5. Frame 100 – 100% indicator set to black and rest are black

Now you should have nice gradient moving from left to the right. It may be hard to achieve so I’ve prepared a video presenting whole process. Make sure to turn on Set Key mode as I did and to press key button each frame to create a key frame.

A couple things to note:

• to see material’s key frames on your time line you have to add this material to teapot or other object first
• you will have to move key frames then because particles are starting to appear slowly and you want your teapot to disappear only when there is a lot of particles already and not right after animation starts.

Step 12

If we now render that at for example 50th frame it will be ok for some objects but not for teapot. You have to add some mapping to it. Modifier called UVW Map should work fine with standard settings but simple objects like teapot. Animation is ready. It looks almost or exactly like we wanted to but you can play with gradient a bit and make it softer or add there some noise to make effect better. I’ve set my noise amount to 0,08, size to 0,93 and mode to Fractal.

Conclusion

Well, that is all for now. I hope you enjoyed my tutorial. As I mentioned you can use this effect in variety of ways. Especially it is useful when you are going to burn something and want to burnt part of your object disappear, when you want to make an explosion and want your object to disappear consecutively part by part. It doesn’t require much calculating power as it is with modifying mesh and gives you quite good results.