Meteor Tutorial - Pyrocluster Tutorial Author - Elentor (http://forums.biorust.com/member.php?u=314)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------> Example in 3 Steps of shaping a meteor

Step 5: We are almost there, but the meteor object looks a little rough. We can correct this by creating a HyperNURBS object from Objects > NURBS > HyperNURBS (a HyperNURBS object serves with the purpose of "smoothing" polygon models) and dragging / dropping the meteor's name over the HyperNURBS in the Object Manager. After you have done this, select the HyperNURBS object and, in the Object tab under the Attributes menu, input 1 in both the Subdivision Editor and Subdivision Renderer boxes. This will not only to reduce the enormous polygon count that could bring your PC to a crawl, but will also prevent the meteor from becoming too "rounded". With this step complete, perform all necessary final tweaks to your meteor object until it suits your personal tastes, and then progress onto the next section.

Section 2 - Texturing the Meteor
Now that you have the meteor shaped to your liking, you will have to give it an appropriate texture. You can create a rock texture easily in Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, or your favourite alternative but, because I'm in a particularly nice mood, I will give you this texture to make your life a little easier. Please bear in mind that this texture was entirely created following the steps of my Pattern Maker Tutorial, so take a peek over in that direction if you want to give yourself a more rounded understanding of 3D texturing.

Step 6: In the Materials Menu, click File > New Material. Select the New Material and, in the Attributes Menu, unmark Specular (it's a rock!) and mark Bump (again, it's a rock!).

The Materials Editor The Material Attributes Step 7: Select the Color tab and, in the "x Texture" option, click and select the texture that you have just downloaded/created. If it pops up a message saying "This image is not in the document search path. Do you want to create a copy at the document location?", just click Yes. You can edit the Search Paths at Edit > Preferences > Texture Paths later. Do the same for the Bump tab. Since we are using a coloured, basic, non-optimized texture to be a bump map, set the Strength to 100 or 110 (yes you can set the % beyond the slider).

The "Assigned Texture" Icon The Assigned Texture Attributes Your result (if everything goes ok)

Section 3 - The Particle Emitter
Step 8: We will now create a Particle Emitter, which will emit particles of fire behind the meteor object. Go to Objects > Particle > Emitter to add an emitter object. Adjust the meteor to make it look like it is falling, and do the same with the Emitter object that you just created. You might need to rotate it 90 degrees in the Y direction depending on how you created and modelled the sphere. Just to be safe, create a null object (Objects > Null Object) and drag all objects in the Object Manager into it.  This will serve as a grouping method, and allow the meteor and emitter to be rotated as one.

The Meteor and the Emitter Selected with Rotation Mode on

Set the Emitter size to 6.6m. Also, make sure the Blue Arrow (the Z Axis) is aiming away from the falling nose of the meteor so that the particles are sprayed in the correct direction. Now, select the Emitter, and take a look of the options available in the Attributes Manager. Yep, there's quite a few!

The most important options are as follows: The Birthrate Editor and Birthrate Renderer values control the birth rate of particles coming from the emitter. The higher the number, the more particles that will created in a given timeframe. The first option is the one that you will be seeing  real-time in the Editor, and the second one affects the number of particles you will see in the final render. I usually set both to the same value, but if you want a particularly large number of particles, you may want to reduce the Birthrate Editor value a little to speed up your view ports. The Start Emission and Stop Emission values state when the emission of particles will start and stop.  This is an incredibly important value for animations, and can even have an impact on static renders like ours. The Lifetime value controls how long each single particle will live, after which they will fade into oblivion. You can add a variation factor to randomize this number. The fourth value, Speed, is one of the most important variables in this section, and is the one you will spend most of your time tweaking to your own personal tastes.  Combined with Lifetime, these variables control the flux of your particles. That said, it's basic purpose is a bit obvious (it manages the speed of each particle). You can also set a random variation. In the Emitter tab, we have the Emitter format (Emitter Type) which can be either Pyramid or Cone. For round and smoother results, we will use Cone. The X-Size and Y-Size we have already set (6.6m).   The angle dictates the angle that the cone or pyramid will be "open". Since we are making a particle effect which begins with the meteor (the fire growing in it's back) and ends with smoke, this angle will have to be set so that the particles can "open" and expand it's area. I recommend you to play with these options. Really. Play. You can get great results by experimenting with the different possibilities. Before we proceed, increase the number of frames by selecting Edit > Project Settings from the main menu and boost the Maximum value to 900 (which will also allow you to set the Stop Emission value of the emitter to 900 too). Now set the Emitter Attributes to the values on the right.  These give us a decent particle birthrate, an appropriate speed, and a good flux. The angle is slightly open so the particles can expand themselves. We're done here! Moving on...

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...

Section 5 - Pyrocluster (Part 2)
Step 12: This is the single most important section of the whole tutorial.   Click and select the Pyrocluster object in the material manager. It will open the Globals tab of the Attributes Editor. Way down there, on Settings, select the Pre-Customized "Fireball" - We're going to use it as a template. Easy, huh? Well, not really - here's a closer look at the Globals tab and its many options:

The Globals tab of the Pyrocluster Material	The Volume is just that - The Volume of the texture. It's not related to the size of the effect, but the "fill rate" of the texture. The bigger the value, the stronger the presence of the resulting fireball. I don't think you'll need to play around with the Luminosity. It adjusts the brightness of the texture focused from its centre. The default setting is adequate in our case. Density could be replaced by "Transparency", and its functionality is rather obvious. Again, play with it to see how it works, as it can be rather fun. Color adjusts the colour of the particles. The far left of the slider represents the centre of the emitter, whilst the far right represents the outer regions.
The new configurations	Step 13: The Fireball preset is cool, but is far removed from the effect we really want to create. For example, the Color possesses far too many contrasts, and the red-wine shades just don't sit well with the idea of a flaming meteor.   With this in mind, alter the colours to resemble the image on the left. The RGB configurations I used (left to right) were 255/166/0, 233/106/0 and 0/0/0 respectively. Optional: At this stage you can try a render. Click the Play Forwards button in the Animation bar until frame 100 or so, and render to test the effect. The Play button
Step 14: Unless something has gone horridly wrong or you missed an important part of the tutorial, your render should show a MASSIVE orange glow.  This is caused by the enormous size of our particles, so go to the Shape Tab of the Pyrocluster Material. Once there, change the Radius from 100m to 10m.
Step 15: Your render should now show a long trail of fire. This is very cool, but we are still missing something rather important - Smoke, and the transition between the fire and smoke. Luckily, animating the Pyrocluster texture is ridiculously easy and requires no ability with keyframing or any other technique. Simply click on the Age tab and change the properties to resemble those on the left.   As with step 12, the options are explainable thus: The sliders represent a progression, where the far left is the frame where the Emitter's Particle Emission starts and the far right is where it stops. With exception of the Color Slider, these are greyscale sliders -  White represents the max value and Black the min value. Knowing this, we can already play around with the scales: The Radius will not change during the emission, so it remains solidly white. The Luminosity will be fading as the emission trails across the scene, so add a black mark in the Luminosity option to identify where the fire stops and the smoke begins. Color Mix affects how greatly the Color slider affects the particles. A black colour in the color mix negates the effect of the colour in the slider beneath (i.e. in this case, the white colour will not show), whereas white means the exact opposite.  Since we begin at full power, it will begin as black and then fade to grey as the smoke surges. Color sets the color that will be "Mixed". Since we want it to turn into grey as it becomes  smoke, you can set any greyish color here. I've set white since it also turns the colour into greyscale. And that is it. It's configured. Yep, it was that simple!   Well, maybe not THAT simple, but relatively easy nonetheless. Now just render your scene and you've got yourself a meteor!
Epilogue: I hope this tutorial has been useful. Pyrocluster is pretty confusing at the start, but gets easier as you use it.  I plan to make another Pyrocluster tutorial (an advanced one) soon, but everything in due time...  By the way, it's already 01:33 am here, which means I'm 17 by now! Time sure goes fast when you're having fun! Anyway, if you want to drop me a message, constructive criticism, suggestions or, even better, ideas for a new tutorial, my e-mail is kaliath@-nospam-uol.com.br, where -nospam- is removed by yourself.  Or you can just leave a message via the Biorust Forums PM system.  Happy hunting!