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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Thinking Particles
5. Tips & Tricks
Don’t make your life more difficult than it has to be (which doesn’t just apply to working with Thinking Particles)
and make use of the object library where you will find the most important Thinking Particles Nodes already
assigned to objects and with simple interfaces which, in most cases, will save you a lot of time.
Organize your setup. XPresso and / or Thinking Particles setups can become very complex. It helps to keep your
setup organized as they are being created. Nodes can be grouped and good annotations will definitely help if
you don’t want to wonder what in the world you did when you created this scene three weeks ago.
Don’t forget that particles can increase the size of your scene dramatically. If you create an emitter that
generates 10,000 objects and 10,000 polygons in every frame even the fastest computer will drop to its knees
(figuratively, of course). We recommend you work with the faster preview functions until the very end of your
project before assigning particles to geometry.
6. In Closing
We have reached the end of our Thinking Particles tutorial. You have carefully tested the waters and we hope
you stayed in. Maybe our little demonstration has encouraged you to move on to bigger and better things. Go
ahead and experiment! Have fun! As we mentioned at the beginning, Thinking Particles can be very complicated
but the most complex setup begins with a single node. If you take it step-by-step it will only by half as bad as
you think ...!
On that note, we hope this little tutorial has helped you on your way to a (particle) stormy future!