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Section 4 - Pyrocluster (Part 1)
Step 9: Now comes the painful bit! Creating a Pyrocluster Material is a bit more complicated than your average material/shader and, let me say, almost impossible to discover without aid of a tutorial.  Firstly, in the Materials Manager, select File > Pyrocluster and create both Pyrocluster and a Volume Tracer. The first is the "real" material that you will be using in the emitter, whilst the second one is an object that will give the particles 3D volume in the "environment". This necessitates, of course, that we have an environment in the first place, so go to Objects > Scene > Environment to create it. You will now have an Environment object. I personally HATE the Environment system of Cinema 4D, so don't mess with it's attributes - just drag and drop the Volume-Tracer to the Environment and we're done.

The Volume-Tracer assigned to the Environment object

Step 10: Now, Rule Number 1 of the Pyrocluster: "It shall be slow and thus shall require great amounts of patience". The Number 2 is: "Pyrocluster is SLOW.... in case of doubt refer to Rule number 1". But fear not, for I will teach you a way to make Pyrocluster faster! The place where you can adjust Pyrocluster core configurations is in the Attributes section of the Volume Tracer Material (that's the Material, NOT the Assigned Texture Tag in the Objects manager). A quick look at the image on the left shows us the wealth of options available.

Step 11: For this step we will be playing with the Render Mode. Before we begin, though, I feel that it is important to remind you that the Crispy setting is VERY SLOW. It's the standard, but we will need alternatives. For this scene we'll be using Crispy Gas, which is much faster than Crispy, whilst only slightly inferior in terms of quality. Whilst it is true that you WILL lose some quality, Crispy Gas' increased speed will more than make up for it, and it additionally emulates fire and gas even better than Crispy. If you want the best results you can always revert to Crispy for your final render. One cool render mode, though is "User", which gives you greater fine control over the rendering options. You can control the quality using the World Step Size setting - "1" is the perfect option, whilst greater values will give you lower quality images that render faster. For quick visualizations I use a value of 10. Here are some compressed images of the same scene, in same frame, and the time it took to render (in minutes): "Crispy" - 2:00 "Crispy Gas" - 1:03 "User" - World Step Size 10 - 0:37 "User" - World Step Size 15 - 0:36 With these images at hand it is easy to make several important conclusions: Firstly, the Crispy mode takes the longest, but also generates a very smoothest render of the particle effects. Crispy gas is almost twice as quick, and gives a sharper render (I personally prefer it for this kind of effect than Crispy). User modes with World Step 10 and 15 are totally distorted, but render in 25% if the time it takes to output a Crispy render. This makes these modes ideal for checking that colours are set correctly, that the flux of particles is fine, etc. With these points in mind, choose Crispy Gas. Also, drag and drop the Pyrocluster material to the Emitter object. We are going to edit it, and we are going to edit it now! Note: Remember my promise that this tutorial wouldn't take too long?  Well, I lied (I've just surpassed 16k of pure text!).  That said, the next page is the final one...

- Tutorial written by Elentor

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