August 28th 2017 08:00:06am

Welcome to the X-Particles liquid Streaks video tutorial. I decided to mix things up a bit and do a Cinema4D and X-Particles video tutorial this time around. I’m gonna show you how to build this neat liquid sim in X-Particles, that you will be able to art direct via a spline path. I had developed this build a number of months back for a project I was helping out on and they decided to go a different direction, so I took what I had learned during that process and transformed it into this setup here.

I had spent only a short period developing the look, and knocked out around twenty quick stills of various shapes to show how quick it was to output. Those stills are throughout the article. During that time I had come across the video manual web page for X-Particles which I had previously not known about. If you didn’t know about this, then go there now and learn. X-Particles Video Manual Mike Batchelor has made a number of videos explaining so many of the objects in X-Particles.

One particular video had caught my eye, and opened them wide. A lot of people have had issues with bubbly or bumpy looking meshes when using the Skinner object. Myself included in this. Usually you would have to amp up your particle count to fill in your volume and smooth over the surface. While that can still ring true, there are ways to find a mid point of not having to load a ton of particles to make the volume smooth. This is by using some of the Cinema4D Deformer objects. Mike explains specifically about Skinner Object here.

In this tutorial I will go over creating an emitting object that we will use as our “brush” to paint with, and how to draw out a spline path to be used by the emitter. I’ll also show you which control parameters will help you refine the look of the liquid streak, by controlling the Motion Inheritance value, particle radius, and spline intermediate points.

This overall build eventually became the foundation for a character liquid sim test, which took quite a bit of time to process. I had ramped up the particle count, and many other parameters. I may do a tutorial on this one in the future.