X-PARTICLES 4
| | Price £540/$716 (Upgrade from X-P3.5: £220/$292) company Insydium Website insydium.ltd
What’s new in this release?
With its latest update to X-particles, developer Insydium has made significant additions to what was already a feature-rich plugin. It gains new fluid solvers with smoke and fire, a new cloth simulation system, additional particle flow controls and modifiers, an OPENVDB mesher and much more besides.
Possibly the most anticipated new element is Explosiafx, the smoke and fire sim originally developed for Softimage by Blackcore Technology and now owned by Insydium. The system operates within a voxel grid, with a real-time preview showing the colour and shape of the fire/smoke simulation. You simply add an object with an Explosiafx Source tag and then press play to start the simulation. You can also mix and match Explosia with other X-particles modifiers to art direct your smoke and fire, creating ghostly tendrils or weird, abstract forms.
Naturally the system draws comparison to Turbulencefd (£369/$489), the go-to smoke and fire sim for Cinema 4D, and while Explosiafx is easier to get to grips with initially, there’s certainly no denying that TFD’S GPU acceleration is leagues ahead in terms of speed. Explosiafx’s Cpubased simulation times aren’t too bad, but there’s a long preparation before C4D’S renderer kicks in. It’s fine at higher voxel sizes, but for really detailed simulations, with voxel sizes at 1cm or less, the prep time becomes unusably high. So while the native renders are gorgeous, it makes experimenting something of a chore. As a consequence, the best course of action is to cache the simulation as VDB files and render using a thirdparty renderer, such as Octane, Arnold, Redshift or Insydium’s own Cycles 4D. This negates the preparation time but does mean you have to step outside the native C4D workflow.
Next on the checklist is X-particles’ updated fluid solver: xpfluidpbd for smallscale fluids, and xpfluidfx for larger-scale simulations. These can be used in tandem with the new OPENVDB mesher to create flowing fluids of mixed densities/viscosities. Setup is relatively simple and you have a lot of control over how you want the fluids to behave. However it does take work to get them looking right, even with the OPENVDB mesher. It’s a distinct improvement over the old xpskinner, but requires a bit
of experimentation before you hit upon the right values, using a combination of mesh settings and multiple filters to achieve a smooth, realistic-looking mesh. Again, the closest comparison is with Realflow | Cinema 4D, which, to be honest, is much faster to simulate and has a superior mesher. But for a dedicated plugin costing over £600 – more than X-P 4 in its entirety – you’d be surprised if it wasn’t the better solution.
One of the big surprises in X-particles 4 is the new cloth system, which uses a particle simulation to deform an underlying polygon object. Again, it’s easy to set up and is surprisingly fully featured for a brand-new addition. With the right settings, the end results are very realistic, and the addition of elements like tears, pinning and stickiness make Cloth FX a genuinely useful addition to the software.
Another handy feature is xpflowfield, providing yet more control over how you want your particles to behave. You simply add it to your scene, making sure it encompasses the particle setup, and can then determine the shape of the flow using a target, splines, shaders, object surfaces, a random field or by importing an FGA flow field file. It works great with pretty much everything, including Explosiafx, and can create some really interesting results.
These features alone would constitute a fine update, but X-P 4 also includes a new cellular automata system for building mathematical/organic structures, the Circle Packer object to avoid particle overlap, a Newtonian Gravity system, as well as a range of new modifiers, including strange attractors and spline flow. To say this is a substantial release is something of an understatement, and the joy of X-particles is that most of these new systems play well with other areas of the plugin, providing almost limitless scope for exploration and experimentation.
On a final note, as X-particles grows in complexity, some of its functionality is hampered by the host hardware. The plugin can produce some amazing effects, but can be a real processor hog. Let’s hope future releases bring multithreaded optimisations or, given Insydium’s experience with Cycles 4D, some Gpufriendly code to really unlock its potential.
X-particles is now a huge one-stop source for particlebased effects, and with so many features it’s difficult to keep track of them all. The new fluid systems aren’t yet best-inbreed, but there’s no denying the value in this impressive release, which offers something for everyone.
“The Joy of X-particles is That most of The new SYSTEMS Play well with other areas of The Plugin, Providing almost limitless SCOPE for exploration and experimentation”