Utilize Blender Hair Particles With Instancing And Add A Collision Object

All right guys how's it going so i have a nice tutorial for you today and i'm going to show you how to use a particle emitter and we'll change this to here and we'll then use an instance object, and it creates this nice effect and just for Good measure i'll just show you how to quickly add a collision object. Now i need to apologize. I'Ve got a sore throat, so bear with me so i'll select the plane i'll come to the particle settings here or the particle properties and i'll hit the plus sign. Now, rather than using a metal i'll use here now, obviously the hair length is a little bit large. So i'm going to drop this down to 50 centimeters so 0.5 and i'll put the number of hairs down just to make things just a little bit easier at the moment. Now. Obviously, i need an object to instance, so it doesn't necessarily need to be a cube, but i'm going to add a cube just for simplicity reasons, so press shift d mesh cube i'll tap on the edit mode, i'll press s to scale this right down i'll press. Three to select faces and i'll select, this top face and i'll just drag this up. The next thing, i'll do is i'll tap back into object, mode and i'll select the plane again i'll come to the particle settings and i'll come down to the render settings, and you can see here that it's actually set as path now. I can change this to object, which lets me then instance, the object, so i'll use the dropper tool and i'll just select the cube now. One thing that you might immediately notice is that the scale and rotation is off, so what i can do here is, i can put the scale up a little bit now. This is good if you want to make like a wooden floor, and i can put the scale randomness up just a little bit just to kind of break the mesh up. One thing: that's pretty daunting is that the rotation is off. So what i can do here is, i can actually enable object, rotation and i'm just going to cheat and i'm just actually going to rotate the cube. Now i don't necessarily need to do this. I could actually use the origin point, which is probably a better method. To be honest, but that looks fine to me that looks cool. I'Ve got a nice little bit of variation. I'Ve got a nice bit of shape and what i'm going to do here is i'm just going to quickly hide the cube and we get this kind of mini city, so you can already start to see the advantages of using a particle system, an instance in objects. You can create really nice effects, but i don't want that. I want to add dynamics because hey, why not so select the plane again i'll scroll down and i'll enable here dynamics now, if actually press play in the timeline, nothing will actually happen at the moment and we can kind of jazz this up a lot. But we can add in things like a force field. So if i go to add force field, we'll just do something nice and easy, and we'll just do something like a vortex. Let'S move this up a little bit, let's scrub back in the timeline and press play. Let'S see what we get, i honestly don't know why you would use this, but it does look pretty damn good. So the next thing i'm going to do is add in a collision object and i'm going to spread the polygons a little bit. Hey so come to add and i'll just add in a basic uv sphere, now press one to come to the side view. Let'S move this up, i only want the collision object to gently brush against it, so it doesn't necessarily need to sit directly in the mesh i'll move this to the left of keyframe. So i'll insert a keyframe here i'll go to maybe a frame 120 and i'll move this to the left or the right in this case, and what i need to do here is, i need to tell blender this is a collision object, so i'll come to the Property settings for the physics and i'll enable a collision object. Now, i'm not going to play around with the dampening or the stiffness i'll just leave everything on default. You can play around with this settings. It'S always good fun to learn this kind of stuff. So i'll go back in the timeline i'll hit play and let's see what i get, how cool is that and that's pretty much the basics of using hair and instancing now one thing that i found is: if you enable smoothing on a mesh - and you run your Bake you end up with this horrible topology. So what you're better doing is baking. First then turn and smoothing on so to bake. The mesh is pretty easy. To be honest, you select the plane, you go to particle settings and you'll, see here cache and that lets you bake and once it's baked, everything will run pretty damn fast and you can add things like interpolated children, so you can make a scene really really dense And that really is the basics of it play around with it start to learn some of the techniques and some of the failures with it. So one thing i'm going to do is i'm just going to hide the sphere from the render engine so i'll just come up here and enable the restriction, toggles and i'll take the sphere of the render engine disable and render and i'll disable in the viewport as Well, and because it's already baked when i hit play it'll pretty much run in real time, it's running at 25 frames per second and that's cool. Do me a favor guys like the video subscribe to the channel? If you haven't already follow me, twitter support me in gumroad. You know what to do. Take care.