Last year at Siggraph I was working at the particleIllusion booth, and Elvis Deane (my co-moderator at the pIllusion cow forum) did this inbelievable animation of himself, greenscreened, disolving into smoke. You may want to hop by our forum here at the cow and ask him about how exactly he did it.
I hate to sound like a broken record in this forum, but…
Just so you know, particleIllusion is a stand-alone app that works really well with after Effects. It comes with over 1300 FX out of the box (many of them smoke, fire, sparkles…plus a lot others), and it beats any particle generator for AE in speed and ease of use. Part of that is becasue it doesn;t have the overhead many plugins have to deal with in AE. However, it isn’t directly in AE, which means you have to do a little extra work, like bringing in video BG’s from AE into pIllusion, and then rendering out the particle footage and importing files into AE. Also, it is only a 2D prgram unlike particular which is 3D.
FYI – pIllusion for OSX was released today, in case you are on a mac.
Sorry to all for being such a pIllusion enthusiast – I just love it and use it whenever possible, and I feel the need to share the love…
Aharon
—————————————-
Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com