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Two Questions, Crashing and adding emitters
Hi. I just got Particle Illusion and I’m slowly getting the hang of it, but I am having two problems. One, the program will just disappear for no reason, even in the middle of exporting an avi file. In other words, it’s crashing, but with no error messages or freezing up. It just disappears.
Second, I’ll place an emitter on the stage, and then I can place another, BUT, if I do anything to an emitter, like change it’s position or make a line, etc. I can’t add anymore emitters. I can click on one and highlight it, but when I put my cursor over the stage it stays a cursor, it doesn’t change into the emitter symbol and it won’t place the emitter on the stage. Even if I drag an emitter onto the stage I’ll see it until I let go of the mouse button, and then it disappears.
Any ideas?
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12 Replies
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At least 90% of problems that people have with the Windows versions of particleIllusion are OpenGL issues that can be resolved by getting the latest drivers from your graphics card manufacturer’s website.
If you’re not in “add” mode, you’ll never be able to add another emitter. There’s a preference to switch to “select mode after adding” an emitter — turn it off.
Alan.
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I did just grab the latest OpenGL recently, so it’s not that. I’ll look for that other thing you mentioned. I can’t see your post when replying so I forgot what you said but I’ll check again. Thanks
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Just checked and “select mode after adding” was already off.
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OK, I’ve fine tuned the problem to this. When I click on the arrow button to position an emitter, I can’t unclick the arrow. From that point on I can’t do anything as far as adding other emitters. How do I get out of “arrow” mode?
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Sounds like you’re clicking the “Move” button. That’s an alternate (and not the easiest) way to move an item. It’s only useful when you can’t click directly on an object (maybe because 2 objects are on top of each other).
Press the “A” key a couple of times with the mouse cursor over the stage window. It should change from a circle to a regular “arrow” cursor. Circle means “add” mode, arrow means “select” mode. The easiest way to move an emitter is switch to select mode and drag it in the stage window.
Alan.
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I’m not sure what you mean by “the latest OpenGL”. I meant to say “download the latest video drivers from your card manufacturer’s website”.
If you are using the latest drivers and they are “beta” drivers, try using the last “qualified” or “released” drivers instead. Beta drivers sometimes create new problems.
Alan.
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I also forgot to mention that if you have some repeatable steps that cause a crash, please let us know what the steps are!
Alan.
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But my problem is getting OUT of select mode. Once it turns into a pointer I can’t get back to add mode.
Also, while I have your attention, I just made a short (bad) video with a lot of emitters to see if the program would crash. It didn’t, so I seem to have fixed that problem. But I didn’t switch to select mode, just in case.
Anyway, I imported an avi with sound, but after I output the video as an avi, the sound is missing. Now what am I doing wrong!?! Don’t forget to answer my question about getting OUT of select mode. Thanks
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It’s a .dll file that you install into windows/system. I tried getting the latest drivers for my computer at Intel. They were the correct drivers but I got an error message saying the computer something something blah blah blah…
Anyway, as I said, it doesn’t seem to be crashing anymore. I just have two problems as outlined in the last post, not being able to get out of select mode, and no sound in my outputted video.
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No, it’s not repeatable steps. As I said, in one instance the program just disappeared while outputting a video! But it hasn’t crashed today.
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