Your first simulation
Make a stream of particles, bake it, play it, change it and bake again, in five minutes.
This page makes the Particles starter: a stream of particles from a small emitter, set up by the sidebar's own settings, so every setting is in front of you. It takes about five minutes.
Save the file
Start from a new file (FileNewGeneral) and save it
somewhere. The bake is written to a vecflow_cache folder next to the .blend,
so saving first keeps it with your project. (An unsaved file bakes into
Blender's temporary folder.)
Make the simulation
Delete the default cube if you like. Then, with the mouse over the 3D Viewport, press ShiftA and pick VecFlowParticles.
Or press N to open the sidebar, pick the VecFlow tab, and click the Particles card under New Simulation.
Two objects appear at the 3D cursor: Particles Emitter, a small cube Empty the particles come from, and Particles, which holds the simulation. The emitter is selected, and the sidebar shows the simulation's settings.
Bake
Press Bake at the top of the VecFlow tab. A progress bar takes the button's place, with a stop button beside it; Blender stays free to use while it runs. When it's done, the box under the button says "Baked, frames 1–250", with the particle count, where it ran and how long it took.
Play it
Press Space to play, or drag along the timeline. Playing back only reads the baked files, so it's as fast as Blender can draw.
Change it
Open the Emission panel and raise Spread from 1.5 to 4: the particles fly out in a wider cone. The status box now says Changed since the bake, and the old bake still plays. Press Bake again to see the change.
Try a few more: Wind in Forces (an X of 3 blows them sideways), or Colour set to Fixed in Size, Spin and Colour.
Let it bake by itself
Turn on Auto Bake, under the Bake button. Now each change bakes again a moment after you make it, up to the frame you're on, so you see changes as you make them. Moving to a later frame bakes on to it.
Where the files went
Next to your .blend file there is now a folder vecflow_cache, holding a
folder for this file, one for the object, and in it bake_0001 with one file
per frame. Each new bake goes in a new numbered folder, and the old one is
removed once the new one is done. See The cache folder.
Things to know
- Display settings change without a bake. Everything in the Display panel (the sphere size, trails, how many show in the viewport) changes the bake as it plays. The settings tables mark these Live.
- Nothing shows outside the baked frames. Before frame 1 or after the last baked frame, the particles object is empty.
- The sidebar follows the selection. Select the particles object or its emitter to see its settings. Click on empty space and the tab shows New Simulation again.