Day 171

Next it's onto particle effects. The book wanted me to create a mist like effect coming off of the bike. Apparently it's a wet day. So to get particles, I need to create an emitter to emit them. I did this by drawing a curved line around the wheels which you can see if you enlarge the above picture. So the particles will be emitted from this curve. I can choose the type of particle and the book had me use sprites so each particle is actually a little picture of mist.

The particles can be made to react with things as well so I had them bouncing off of the different scooter parts. When I was done, I thought all this mist coming off the bike just looked weird so I changed things so it'll look more like exhaust coming out of the back. Tweaks to the particles can be how many appear, how long before they disappear, size and color. Here I made the smoke start out as grey and change to white. 

Next I made water droplets come off of the bike. Must have been a really wet day. Now I'm just using a different particle type. I made them slightly translucent with randomized blueish streaks of color. I made the material reflective and gave it a randomized bump map which gives it a shimmery look. All of which you can barely see in the final video but here's a close up picture below.

So finally here's the video again with some physics and particles. After seeing how this site compressed the video, I realized you can't really see the drops but don't worry; they're there.

There were a couple of more chapters after this but they mainly dealt with a program that isn't being supported anymore (this book was release in 2010). They had to do with rendering different parts of the scene separately and then combining them in this other program. So I just read through these chapters but didn't do any of the lessons. Now I'm officially done with this book. Overall, I thought it was a pretty good. I liked how all the lessons involved the same project so by the end, I get a nice final video. My next book is made by the same people and follows up right after this one. It's slightly more advanced and focuses just on characters and animation. So get ready for some more anthropomorphic animals.