-- Emitters with Metaballs -- Back to tutorial index

BEFORE PREFORMING THIS TUTORIAL: Please see the Emitter Basics tutorial and the Metaballs tutorial.

Overview: This tutorial will demonstrate how to use metaball objects in emitters, very groovy for milk!

Step 1: The process to use metaballs in emitters is all in the hierarchy of objects: METABALL then EMITTER then OBJECT (sphere in the example)

The metaballs by them selves are pretty lumpy, If you recall from the metaball tutorial, so to fix this we drop the metaball hierarchy into a hyper nurb object.

Step 2: Lower the radius of your sphere, I made mine 25m. Next thing you should do is increase the amount of frames in your scene, to do this press Ctrl+D and change maximum to 300 F

Step 3: Move your frame button, if you render you can see its just a big blob...how cool is that? </sarcasm>

Step 4: Now we will add some particle deformers! These are awesomely cool deformers for particle systems...kinda gives em some life. We will add a TURBULENCE deformer and also a ROTATION deformer. You will see how this dramatically effects the emitted meta object. To make the TURBULENCE deformer go to OBJECTS > PARTICLE > TURBULENCE (Rotation is right above it)

Step 5: Different settings will yield different results, I placed my turbulence close to my rotation and increased the TURBULENCE strength to 75 and changed my rotation speed to 25. Play around with it, interesting results can be obtained:

Got Milk?

My first attempt at trying to make water particles with metaballs in the same manner

I hope I have explained this well. Questions? Mail me.