From the course: Particular 4 for After Effects Essential Training

Defining particles per second

From the course: Particular 4 for After Effects Essential Training

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Defining particles per second

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- [Instructor] Whenever a particle system is created in Particular, one of the first settings you'll usually adjust is the particles per second. This controls how many particles will be created in the system every single second. Higher numbers signify more particles in the scene. As more particles are added to a system, more processing power will be required. Keeping the numbers down is a balance between the particles per second and the lifespan of each particle. To get a working example, let's look in our project here and go to the timeline. Select layer one, our particle solid. Notice I have a solid. It is the size of the composition, and with that layer selected I can go up under the effect menu, go down to RG trapcode, and, you guessed it, apply Particular. Now with Particular applied we can just use the default settings by pressing the space bar, and you'll see particles pop into the scene. Now I want you to stop playback somewhere in the middle of your composition. I'll stop right here at 2:15. I'm going to open up the emitter options, and in here notice I have an option for particles per second. So right now 100 particles are being born every second. I'm going to go ahead and crank this up to a value of 300, and I'll press enter, and I'll press the space bar to preview this, and once it actually plays through once, I'll go ahead and stop playback over here right around four seconds. Now, I want to scroll up in my Particular effect controls area here, and I want you to open the show system options. Notice with that open, I can see here there are 741 particles visible in the scene, and there are actually 751 total particles. Well, let's do a little math here. I've got 300 particles per second. 741, that's a little more than twice as many, obviously. 600 would be twice 300. So let's go down here and look at the particle options, and notice the very first option here I have is life, which is three seconds. So let's change the lifespan to one second. Now when we press the space bar and begin playback, you'll notice the particles fade off much more quickly, and when we stop playback here towards the end of our composition, we can scroll back up in our effect controls, and notice now it's saying 741 visible. Well that's not quite right, so let's press the space bar here and see if we can get a different refresh, and sometimes this number gets a little finicky, so I'll close the show system, and I'll open it up again, and I'm not sure why it's not refreshing. So here, let me go edit, purge, all memory and disk cache. Yup, we can purge that. Now let's see what happens. When I stop playback here towards the end, notice now there are 300 particles visible, and there's 310 total particles. That's because particles being born at 300 per second that only have a life of one second. You guessed it, at any given time you're only going to be able to see 300 particles. So in order to keep the processing down as you create more and more advanced particle systems, you'll want to go to the show system options here and pay attention to the number of particles visible. If it looks like that number isn't updating, you can definitely go ahead and purge your memory and disk cache by going up under edit and purge, and that'll usually flesh things out so it'll recompute the number of particles that are visible after you press the space bar and then stop playback for that specific area.

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