WEBVTT 00:00.210 --> 00:06.690 In this lesson, I want us to cover and create creating some Firefly's or lightning bugs swarming around 00:06.720 --> 00:10.430 the scene and then they react to the ground explosion. 00:10.770 --> 00:12.990 So there's two different ways we could go about doing this. 00:12.990 --> 00:19.230 One is using in particles, go to effects and we go to the in particles setting. 00:19.590 --> 00:26.970 We could create Omidyar's and then we could create different fields to control them over here. 00:28.050 --> 00:32.490 But instead, what I'd like to do is use a newer kind of feature. 00:32.490 --> 00:40.470 And Maya, which is the mesh network, specifically the dynamics version of MASH, which is essentially 00:40.620 --> 00:48.210 an unknown particle system, and Maya has repackaged it and is using it with MASH. 00:48.780 --> 00:55.800 So we've kind of used in particles a little bit already and we've also used a little bit of mash and 00:55.800 --> 00:56.940 prior lessons. 00:56.940 --> 00:59.340 And so we're going to dig a little deeper into MASH now. 00:59.700 --> 01:05.370 So let's create a new MASH network from a piece of geometry and for our fireflies, I'm just going to 01:05.370 --> 01:06.540 use a little sphere. 01:07.050 --> 01:11.760 And so I'll call that the base firefly. 01:13.440 --> 01:16.290 And I'm just doing that on the outliner off the screen here. 01:16.770 --> 01:18.120 You could also change it here. 01:18.750 --> 01:24.930 And then we are going to go to MASH, Create MASH Network and let's open up the option box and we're 01:24.930 --> 01:31.220 going to choose an instant here and scrunches a grid formation here and I'll hit applying close. 01:31.740 --> 01:39.730 So I'm going to focus in on the extensor and isolates like that. 01:40.860 --> 01:42.780 So now we can kind of see that a little bit better. 01:43.740 --> 01:48.150 And the next thing I'm going to do is open up the MASH Waita. 01:48.150 --> 01:52.050 So I'm going to go to the Ashbery Ed with the MASH kind of node selected here. 01:52.380 --> 01:56.490 I'm just going to go and dock the outliner over here because I think we're going to keep coming back 01:56.490 --> 02:00.990 to that and then also open up the mash ed here. 02:01.230 --> 02:05.880 So that'll kind of be the outliner for the MASH network so we can kind of keep track of what we're doing. 02:06.480 --> 02:09.690 So now we can see by default what we have created here. 02:09.990 --> 02:11.040 And it's pretty basic. 02:11.040 --> 02:14.370 It's a grid and we have a long way to go, but not that long. 02:16.030 --> 02:22.330 So we have a little bit more work to do to make some Firefly's here, so let's look at the next thing 02:22.330 --> 02:24.640 we're going to do is create a bigger grid. 02:24.650 --> 02:25.980 So let's go to distribute. 02:26.440 --> 02:32.380 And this is basically going to be the base for how many fireflies are going to be in our scene. 02:32.390 --> 02:39.640 So we need to make this quite large, because if you remember to the same scale that we've set this 02:39.640 --> 02:42.850 to is real world units. 02:43.270 --> 02:47.150 So the scale is going to be quite large here. 02:47.740 --> 02:57.430 So, yeah, let's just start with something like this, and that's quite a bit you might not need that 02:57.430 --> 03:00.170 many hours to maybe like 500. 03:01.840 --> 03:04.120 Let's see if that's something appropriate. 03:04.120 --> 03:08.740 And I'm kind of checking with this view on the left side, too, because that's our render cam view. 03:09.230 --> 03:11.690 So that's really going to dictate what we really need. 03:11.690 --> 03:16.900 I'm going to turn off, isolate, select here for one second so I can you see this in perspective mode. 03:18.210 --> 03:28.300 So it looks like we have too many, maybe vertically, so we can crank this down and then we can maybe 03:28.300 --> 03:37.710 expand out a little bit more on Z and X, and we're going to reduce this even more with some more nodes. 03:38.170 --> 03:41.650 So, yeah, it looks like we're covering that entire area now. 03:41.980 --> 03:46.980 So now what I want to do is add a visibility node. 03:47.350 --> 03:48.700 So let's go click on MASH. 03:48.700 --> 03:53.830 You can click on it from the MASH Ed or Outliner and we get back to this in the appropriate editor here. 03:54.520 --> 03:57.240 And you can get to that story editor with this button as well. 03:57.940 --> 04:03.790 So let's create a visibility node here and we can just left click and say add a visibility node. 04:04.090 --> 04:05.170 So it'll take a sliver of that. 04:05.170 --> 04:10.540 And then we just reduce the random strength to go ahead and add a new shader to this so we can see it 04:10.540 --> 04:11.070 a little bit better. 04:11.080 --> 04:15.120 So click on the base Firefly, the original that we use that is hidden. 04:15.120 --> 04:24.130 And by default, when you use MASH and just get that selected, isolate it and I'll just right. 04:24.130 --> 04:26.050 Click in here and say assign new material. 04:26.660 --> 04:30.880 And for now I'm just going to say a surface shader and crank that to white. 04:31.870 --> 04:33.070 So we can see that. 04:33.550 --> 04:40.000 And sometimes Maya doesn't want to update the shader stuff. 04:40.000 --> 04:43.440 So sometimes opening the hypercharged, you can see it fixes that. 04:43.450 --> 04:46.450 So that's a bug that they probably already fixed by now. 04:46.450 --> 04:51.240 But and yeah, that's you always have to kind of look for workarounds in Maya. 04:51.790 --> 04:59.920 So we have the visibility node and that's kind of helping us create a more random pattern of Firefly's 04:59.920 --> 05:00.190 here. 05:00.190 --> 05:01.750 And it's something that we can animate. 05:02.030 --> 05:07.900 This is what's so powerful about MASH is we don't have to go, you know, sphere by sphere and turn 05:07.900 --> 05:08.500 them on and off. 05:08.500 --> 05:10.960 We just have this one slier that controls all of them. 05:11.260 --> 05:17.140 And if for some reason we don't like this orientation, we can just change the random speed and that 05:17.140 --> 05:24.310 will affect this random strength and apply it differently, but keep the same amount of strength. 05:24.820 --> 05:28.240 So really, we can just kind of dial in exactly how much we want to have here. 05:28.600 --> 05:34.900 And then the next thing we can do is add a random node so it'll change this even more. 05:35.410 --> 05:41.380 Because, you know, even though this is randomly changing the visibility of what we can see, it's 05:41.380 --> 05:44.650 still you know, these two are in a line here. 05:44.650 --> 05:47.770 You can kind of see they're still you know, there's two here that are in a line. 05:48.100 --> 05:57.370 So we want to change that by going into random position and maybe doing something even more drastic 05:58.450 --> 05:59.410 and. 06:01.500 --> 06:08.580 Yeah, something like that, so they're a little more random and might bring back some of these because 06:08.580 --> 06:10.110 it looks like the left side's a little empty. 06:10.110 --> 06:12.470 So I'm going to maybe change the seed here as well. 06:12.570 --> 06:14.490 That looks a little better filled out. 06:15.000 --> 06:22.020 And I might increase the distance to the camera because I don't feel like we're getting any like right 06:22.020 --> 06:23.480 into the foreground of the camera. 06:23.490 --> 06:24.840 We can see the cameras here. 06:25.200 --> 06:28.200 So be nice to get some all the way to the camera. 06:28.560 --> 06:32.100 We could add a transformer and just move all of these forward. 06:32.490 --> 06:39.090 But instead, I think I'm going to go back to distribute node and increase the Z distance here, as 06:39.300 --> 06:40.980 you can see that expand. 06:40.980 --> 06:44.760 Hopefully you can see that on your screen and said expand as I do that. 06:44.760 --> 06:49.830 And we can kind of get the Firefly's to go all the way to the camera. 06:50.550 --> 06:52.440 And I might. 06:54.230 --> 06:58.110 Dial that back and do a transform just so you can kind of see all of it. 06:58.130 --> 07:05.500 So out of transform note, I'm going to command click Middle Mouse Dragon here and we can just drag 07:05.500 --> 07:07.450 that value up. 07:07.660 --> 07:13.860 So it kind of favor everything towards the camera a little bit when you go back to the remote cam. 07:13.910 --> 07:19.300 Now you can see there's a firefly here really close to the camera and we can always go back into this 07:19.300 --> 07:24.280 base geometry that we used and it'll scale down all of these. 07:25.030 --> 07:30.220 The other thing we could do is actually use random for scale. 07:30.220 --> 07:36.460 So it's a uniform scale and we can have a random scale value set to these. 07:37.010 --> 07:38.380 So that's another option. 07:38.380 --> 07:40.870 We might just do that just a little bit, that variability. 07:41.560 --> 07:44.740 But in general, I think fireflies are pretty similar size. 07:45.340 --> 07:49.570 And so now we have you know, nothing's moving yet, nothing's animated. 07:49.780 --> 07:54.430 But what's really nice about this, again, is the fact that we can go back in and adjust this stuff 07:54.430 --> 08:01.570 on the fly as we're changing, you know, on the fly, no pun intended, as we're changing stuff, we 08:01.570 --> 08:07.660 can, you know, change the attributes downstream and everything, just kind of updates really fast. 08:08.080 --> 08:12.910 This is what's really nice about MASH and the fact that, you know, we're not having to really simulate 08:12.910 --> 08:13.900 anything here yet. 08:14.180 --> 08:19.270 And within particles, we would have to be simulating already to get to this stage. 08:19.270 --> 08:19.960 So it's kind of nice. 08:19.960 --> 08:25.360 We can set up basically the particles, the instances that we're going to be using and then add dynamics 08:25.360 --> 08:26.140 after the fact. 08:26.360 --> 08:28.060 So let's go ahead and add some dynamics. 08:28.480 --> 08:34.570 So I'm going to go over here and say add dynamics, and that's going to give us a whole slew of things. 08:35.020 --> 08:37.920 And you can see it's setting it up and there's a lot of particles. 08:37.930 --> 08:38.800 I think it takes a minute. 08:39.610 --> 08:41.370 And let's look at our outliner. 08:41.710 --> 08:46.170 So by this stage of the course, we're very familiar with a bullet solver now. 08:46.510 --> 08:50.290 And so it's the same kind of setup here. 08:50.290 --> 08:51.700 You can see the start frame. 08:51.880 --> 08:59.200 Everything that we've learned up to this point, we probably can just turn off the gravity here because 08:59.200 --> 09:03.130 we want these guys kind of floating around in space so we can hit zero on that. 09:03.400 --> 09:09.880 And then what we want to do and how we want to control this stuff then is by using fields. 09:10.330 --> 09:14.500 So if we click on dynamics here, that gives us another kind of option. 09:14.830 --> 09:23.320 And if this stuff, you know, let me just turn back on the gravity just so you can kind of see what's 09:23.320 --> 09:23.770 happening. 09:24.100 --> 09:29.470 And I am going to increase that because of the the scale factor of the scene. 09:29.890 --> 09:34.590 You can see everything just kind of falls down to the ground and the ground by default is actually a 09:34.600 --> 09:35.380 negative 20. 09:35.590 --> 09:36.790 And you can see that here. 09:36.790 --> 09:42.610 So we could actually just bring that up if we wanted to see everything hit the ground that we have established 09:42.610 --> 09:43.030 here. 09:43.720 --> 09:46.600 So we should be able to start to see things at the ground. 09:47.260 --> 09:50.820 And but, of course, we want our Firefly's to fly. 09:51.130 --> 09:53.290 So that's why I was saying we can just turn off the gravity. 09:53.290 --> 09:57.300 But I want to see I wanted you to see kind of what happens just out of the box here. 09:57.820 --> 10:06.490 So when I go back to frame zero here and yeah, everything's looking good and now I'm going to go to 10:06.490 --> 10:17.080 the dynamics tab and I want to show you that we have this kind of section down here for Fields sorry, 10:17.080 --> 10:22.810 that's in the the bullet solar panels here, back in the bullet solver. 10:23.590 --> 10:28.200 We have fields here so we can connect them, but we can't create them from in here. 10:28.210 --> 10:31.060 So what we need to do is go ahead and create them. 10:31.060 --> 10:34.540 And we don't want anything selected when we create the fields. 10:34.540 --> 10:39.310 Otherwise we might get an error because it's trying to attach a field to something that we have selected. 10:39.550 --> 10:43.720 So we just want to make sure we don't have anything selected outside of turbulence field. 10:44.020 --> 10:51.550 And this is basically going to be a kind of noise through noise, through our simulation here. 10:51.880 --> 10:56.980 And with that selected, we're going to really need to crank up the magnitude. 10:57.550 --> 10:59.740 And let's start with like 500, right. 10:59.820 --> 11:02.260 To do like 5000 at some point. 11:02.260 --> 11:09.190 But let's say play and let's go back and make sure we have the gravity turned off here. 11:10.210 --> 11:12.730 And we have no gravity. 11:12.730 --> 11:16.270 We have OK, all of that set fine. 11:16.270 --> 11:20.830 But the one thing we didn't do is actually add that turbulence field to the board solver. 11:21.340 --> 11:28.390 And also, you know, while we're looking at the BOLSOVER, we do need changes subframe to one thousand 11:28.480 --> 11:28.990 one here. 11:29.590 --> 11:35.470 And we don't really need to do any Prioleau with this because it'll just kind of all be working from 11:35.470 --> 11:36.100 the first frame. 11:36.100 --> 11:38.200 So there's no pre roll that we need to worry about. 11:38.710 --> 11:44.590 And so now we can go the bolts, hover and mouse, drag the turbulence field into the fields. 11:44.960 --> 11:45.820 Little window here. 11:45.820 --> 11:49.390 So now it's actually connected this field to that bolt solver. 11:49.570 --> 11:49.900 All right. 11:49.900 --> 11:51.220 So now we press play. 11:52.060 --> 11:53.590 We should get some a little bit of. 11:53.960 --> 12:01.370 Jiggling motion here, and it looks like it's doing a little calculation there and now it's starting 12:01.370 --> 12:05.450 to go and I think we're going to need to really crank up the turbulence field. 12:05.810 --> 12:09.970 So let's go back and crank up the magnitude quite a bit. 12:13.400 --> 12:21.470 And just for right now, I think I'm going to reduce the grid size so we don't have as many particles, 12:21.470 --> 12:27.230 so I'm going to just remember these settings and I'm going to reduce them down a little bit because 12:28.100 --> 12:31.660 it's making our simulation quite, quite a bit slower. 12:32.210 --> 12:34.700 So crank up the scale. 12:34.760 --> 12:36.440 This guy, just so we can see it. 12:37.170 --> 12:43.880 And then let's go to the turbulence field and let's just add a zero here and see what that does. 12:44.250 --> 12:48.230 Because remember, the same scale that we're working at is quite large. 12:50.200 --> 12:57.220 And yeah, we got some movement here, but not a ton, so on that another zero to add two zeros until 12:57.220 --> 12:59.380 I get closer to what I want. 12:59.410 --> 13:01.030 So now you can see check this out. 13:01.330 --> 13:08.440 We're getting all this free animation and everything is moving kind of on its own, kind of course, 13:08.440 --> 13:08.800 here. 13:09.400 --> 13:11.380 And it's pretty awesome. 13:12.080 --> 13:15.430 And so we're getting all this free animation. 13:15.430 --> 13:16.030 Essentially. 13:16.360 --> 13:21.790 The one thing I want to be aware of, though, is the fact that I don't want any Firefly's. 13:21.790 --> 13:22.990 I mean, they could hit the ground. 13:22.990 --> 13:26.740 They're going to end up being much smaller than the size that we're seeing here. 13:28.810 --> 13:34.660 So if you don't want them to hit the ground, you could just add another field so you could go to the 13:34.660 --> 13:43.780 field sollers and add a you can add a uniform field and then just say in the Y direction, you know, 13:43.780 --> 13:48.910 shoot it up magnitude by like 10000 or something and just, you know, keep all the particles off of 13:48.910 --> 13:49.510 the ground. 13:50.740 --> 13:51.890 So let's just go and do that real quick. 13:52.180 --> 13:56.680 Well, let's say uniform, and because I have something selected, it's giving me an error. 13:56.680 --> 13:58.360 So make sure you don't have anything selected. 13:58.600 --> 13:59.800 Go to uniform. 14:00.040 --> 14:06.100 And then we want to have a huge magnitude here because we're keeping in mind the scene scales is quite 14:06.100 --> 14:13.960 large and then we can create a volume shape so we can kind of control where it's happening. 14:14.260 --> 14:19.900 So let's create a cube and then scale it way up and then let's scale it in the. 14:22.220 --> 14:27.500 In these directions, because we want to keep it low to the ground, basically, it's just going to 14:27.560 --> 14:31.000 kick any kind of particle that gets close to the ground. 14:31.010 --> 14:35.090 It's going to kick it off the ground because I don't want these things like landing and sliding around 14:35.090 --> 14:36.400 on the ground and looking weird. 14:36.800 --> 14:40.420 So now we just need to connect it to the board solver. 14:40.790 --> 14:41.020 So. 14:41.030 --> 14:44.570 All right, Millimoles, drag this rather from outliner into here. 14:44.900 --> 14:46.240 So now those things are connected. 14:46.250 --> 14:50.090 So if any, we can actually play this back. 14:50.180 --> 14:53.270 Let's take a look at this particle right here. 14:53.270 --> 14:54.820 Should get shot upward. 14:55.280 --> 14:56.060 So I play. 14:57.310 --> 14:58.630 So watch this. 15:00.490 --> 15:05.380 Oh, you know, what's happening is we didn't set the direction yet, so, yeah, all these parties 15:05.380 --> 15:05.920 are going. 15:07.120 --> 15:08.440 Let's see what direction they're going in. 15:08.440 --> 15:12.930 If we hit the uniform field, the default is X, so again, X, Y, Z. 15:12.940 --> 15:14.260 So let's hit zero. 15:14.530 --> 15:15.220 Let's go. 15:15.220 --> 15:16.150 Positive one. 15:16.160 --> 15:20.290 We want to go upward and let's try it one more time and follow this particle again. 15:22.740 --> 15:25.290 So now it should go straight up, which it is. 15:25.830 --> 15:27.450 So keep these off the ground. 15:30.090 --> 15:37.740 And we can add some drag to the board salver so that they don't just go for forever or some dampening 15:37.740 --> 15:43.610 rather, and that might help it kind of keep from just going into infinity. 15:44.730 --> 15:50.250 We could also add just like a touch of gravity, you can just really play an art director stuff as much 15:50.250 --> 15:54.370 as you want as soon as you kind of get familiar and comfortable with each of these attributes. 15:54.780 --> 16:05.730 So with that done right now, I'm going to continue in the next lesson and actually create the animated 16:05.730 --> 16:13.760 section of the fields where we will help control the reaction to the ground breaking up. 16:13.950 --> 16:19.190 So I want all these fireflies to scatter like crazy when the ground breaks. 16:19.470 --> 16:21.240 So in the next lesson, we will cover that. 16:21.240 --> 16:22.590 And I will see you there. 16:22.650 --> 16:23.310 Thanks for watching.