-- Emitter Basics -- Back to tutorial index

Overview: I will show you in this series how Particle Emitters work and some of their functions. In my opinion, emitters are one of the funnest objects to work with in cinema.

Step 1: You must first make an emitter to do so go to OBJECTS > PARTICLE > EMITTER. This will set up an emitter in your scene.

Step 2: To make an emitter work you must have something to emit right? Make a sphere and drop it into your emitter and change its radius to 10m

Step 3: The next thing is to move the frame button, if your new to cinema this might be new to you, but dont worry its not hard at all. At the bottom of your screen you will see this bar, just click and hold the blue button that displays 0 F to a number of your choosing, this is used in animation the F stands for Frames. I have moved it to 60.

You will now see little white dashes coming from the emitter, this is to show you roughly where your particles will be.

Here is a rendered view:

Next I will go over emmiter settings.

I am only going to go over the important settings.

Birthrate Editor= The amount of particles generated in the scene.

Birthrate Renderer= The amount of particles rendered.

Start/Stop Emission= What frame the particles start emitting, and then when they stop

Seed= This is important if you have more than one emitter. If you have 10 emitters in scene and thier seeds are all the same, they all emit the same way, different seed numbers emit in different patterns to give randomness and variation to the emitters.

Lifetime= How long the particles move.

Speed= Take a guess? Yup, its how fast they move.

Questions? Mail me.