How can I add shadows to these particles?

[Mark Suszko]

Actually I did this a little differently: after I duplicated the emitter layer, adjusting the color, dropping the opacity and demoting the layer behind the original, I just unchecked the “3D” box, and boom, flat version that just needed some x/y tweaking. Not “perfect” yet, but way closer and within the budget:-) Might do as you said and add a blur filter, which covers a lot of sins…

You, Mr. Smith, will never need to buy a meal if you ever drive thru Springfield, IL 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Now If I can just part the particles from the center of the floor… I tried applying a “repel” behavior to the logo in the center of the floor, (logo is a separate piece, sitting just above the floor) but nothing seems to happen. I’m sure I’m missing a step, or not associating things properly…

[Jason Diebler]

For the hole, instead of trying to manipulate 1 group to do what you want it to do, maybe you could stage several mini groups to create the cluster around the logo.

Like so: L = Logo, * = people

* * *
* L *
* * *

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Mark Suszko]

That’s some good lateral thinking, Jason. I may try it.

[Mark Suszko]

Jason, I wound up needing only to duplicate my single rectangular particle people generator, and slide it over to another part of the comp. By applying a little rotation, I got a believable hole in the crowd around the logo on the floor.

[Mark Suszko]

[Terry Mikkelsen]

Nice job!

ps – I found Waldo

Tech-T Productions
http://www.technical-t.com

[Mark Suszko]

LOL. Tell him I’m still waiting for that check.
Downside of using so many particle people is, even with 8 cores cranking, a 20–odd second full-rez, full-quality render pass with the motion blur turned on is taking close to 3 hours. When I get better at this, I will know how to limit the particle generation to more closely fit my camera view, so as to reduce the rendering overhead.

[Andy Neil]

I know you’ve got this figured out, but I thought I’d add a tip for the future. Instead of using a particle emitter, create your crowd with the replicator instead. Then, using a sequence replicator behavior, you can cause some of the replicates to have an opacity of 0. You may need to apply several sequence replicators, but I had the same issue awhile back and that’s how I solved it.

Andy

[Mark Suszko]

NOW he tells me! 🙂

I’ll keep that trick in my pocket for the next time I do something like this. It might be nice for creating lots of vehicles in a highway scene, for example.