## Basic Know How for using the presets

A basic setup
To create particles with the presets you need the following things in a scene
1. Emitter Preset
2. An object to be used as shape for the particles Exception: Multishape Emitter
3. A Particle Geometry object
The shape is assigned to the appropriate link field in the Emitter preset via drag and drop.
The Particle Geometry object can be found under Plugins->Thinking Particles. It is a generator object that creates the geometry for the particles, without it only the preview for particles is visible and they won't be rendered.
Use of particle groups
Particle groups come in handy when you need to differentiate between several kinds of particles.
A good example is the use for particle collisions where you often want one set of particles to collide with another but not with other particles of the same set.
Particle groups can be managed in the TP Settings available from Plugins->Thinking Particles menue.
Example without groups Movie (QT)
In this example the particles of each group will repell each other as soon as they are emitted and will spread out even though the emitter preset has the spread angle set to 0.
Example with groups Movie (QT)
In this example only the particles of different groups react on each other.
Groups are also very handy if you only want specific particles beeing influenced by i.e. Gravity.
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