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Activity Forums Boris FX Particle Illusion Rendering in 1920×1080

  • Rendering in 1920×1080

    Posted by Charlie Vollenweider on December 8, 2012 at 2:15 pm

    Here’s the deal, I downloaded the demo version of Particle Illusion 3 earlier this week, played around with it a bit and decided it was cool. Last night I was creating a project and thought, “Particle Illusion would be perfect for this, I could make it look really awesome”. So I Opened PI set up the project, downloaded several emitter packs, used one got everything perfect but I cannot render it in the proper resolution for my project.

    I am using a monitor with a 1920×1080 resolution and working on a project that is also 1920×1080. When I try to render in PI I can render in 720 (1280×720) but not in 1080 (1920×1080). Any time I attempt to render any format in 1080 either through PI or by opening the REnderer manually it give me the error “Could not find acceptable Pixel Format!” followed by “Can’t create open GL context”.

    This would be a good time to tell you my version and other details:
    I have a windows 7 laptop and am using PI Version 3.0.4.1 demo released 05 Jan 2009.

    I did some reading on several forums and it seems that this is a problem with version prior to 3.0.4, a problem where PI cannot render any image as big as or bigger than the screen. I checked for updates and could not find any so my question is twofold:
    1. Does the current PI release support HD even if your monitor is not HD, or a lower quality HD?
    2. Is there a more current demo or some other way I could test this? (there is no way that I would purchase this if I cannot render in HD)

    Alan Lorence replied 13 years, 6 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • Alan Lorence

    December 8, 2012 at 2:48 pm

    particleIllusion has *always* had the limitation that it needed a visible window to render into, limiting it to slightly smaller than your desktop resolution. pIllusionRender — included with particleIllusion — does not have this limitation.

    What’s happening when you get the “…pixel format…” error is that pI is launching pIRender to do the render, but pIRender can’t create the OpenGL buffers it needs. There are two solutions to this problem:

    1) Launch pIRender manually (there’s a shortcut in the Start menu). Then click the “options” button and uncheck “use hardware acceleration”. This will definitely fix the problem, but your renders in pIR will be much slower.

    2) Update your video drivers. The fact that it’s a laptop makes that more tricky (or possibly impossible), but try finding a driver on your graphics hardware manufacturer’s website (NVIDIA, AMD/ATI, etc.)

    You can load projects directly into pIRender to test any changes.

    Hope this helps.

    Alan.

    ………………..
    Alan Lorence
    Product Manager
    GenArts, Inc.
    http://www.genarts.com
    http://www.wondertouch.com

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