Managing Direction in an X-Particles Crowd Simulation

Director and Motion Designer Steve ‘Supafraud’ Andrus, shows how you can gain better control over the orientation and direction of an X-Particles Crowd Simulation by using some other Cinema 4D tools.

how to use X-Particles, Mograph and Xpresso to generate Particles that orient themselves smoothly

Although you can easily create an X-Particles Crowd Simulation thanks to Insydium’s focus on making X-Particles powerful yet simple. The problem is when the crowd objects run into each other, they don’t change direction smoothly, they will just “pop” into a new vector. This makes for an unrealistic and not very natural looking animation.

Here, Steve uses Cinema 4D’s MoGraph and Xpresso to generate particles that can correct their direction smoothly as they roll along. Check out the tutorial for creating Smooth Tangential Orientation with X-Particles and MoGraph here.