Advanced disintegration ?

[Alan Lorence]

I’m not sure what you’re asking. You say that simple dots are not enough, but then point to Elvis’ example, and say that it’s a good example of more than simple dots. But that example just uses simple dots for the particles!

Perhaps you are asking about the particle motion after disintegration? It all depends on what your scene is. In Elvis’ example, he gets shot from the right, so he has the particles move slightly to the left (using the emitter’s emission angle and range), and has them fall (using a fairly high “weight” value).

You can also use forces to make the particles “scatter” in more than one direction.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Shadu]

Just lower the particle size and raise a lot their number. It will do the trick. They will not look like dot anymore but particle of dust.

Shadu

[Eran Solomon]

Hey ,
if youll take example from the movie posted in the tutorial here ::
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/deane_elvis/disintegratePeople/smokeyDissolve01.wmv

youll see that there arent any dots at all.. Im particually after the effect he made while ‘coming back’ from particles in that short clip.

if youll watch it youll know what I mean. how can I preform that effect ?

Thanks again for your time!

[Alan Lorence]

Ah, I forgot about that clip. Just use any particle shape image you want. In this case, Elvis used an animated sequence of a “curly smoke” image. He also used Forces to “blow” the particles in different ways.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Elvis Deane]

Yeah, that’s the only difference between the emitters in the two versions. An animated particle shape can make all the difference, and bringing Forces into a scene add a lot of randomness and realism that you just don’t get from an emitter all by its lonesome.

[Dominick]

as the others pointed out… you can use any emitter as the particle. They could be shaped like stars if you wanted 😉

[Eran Solomon]

He used a certian shape (curley smoke.. is that in any of the libraries?) , but in the tutorial it says to use the size of 5.. also If i use a shape thats too big you loose the shape of the person .. so how did it happen ?

[Alan Lorence]

Just do it. It’s a combination of the particle shape (bitmap), size, size variation, etc. We can’t give you a formula to try — you have to experiment.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Chortorn]

In the clip the person is reappears after being disintergrated.
Is it made in a compositing program or is there a way to make particles fly “backwards” – or reverse the timeline in a single layer etc.?

Chortorn

[Elvis Deane]

I first reversed the footage of me walking across the screen, and imported it into pI as my background. I used the techniques described in all those tutorials to make the smoke fly away from the backwards walking me. Then I rendered the particles flying off in every direction

After that I reversed the playback of the rendered particles in my compositing program, and laid them over the original video where I was walking straight ahead, so that it would look like the particles were flying in and settling down.

Took me a while to figure it out the first time, but once I know what I was doing it wasn’t hard to do again (though it is a bit time consuming because of all the preparation).