Making a custom creeping vapor emiller

[Philip Knight]

“Can I create a emitter from my .psd or an Ai layer and is there somewhere to learn how to make emitters from scratch?”

Yes, you can. Just save the .psd as a .png with alpha, of course. Then:

— Go to an emitter’s Emitter Property in Library > Particle > Change Shape section where you see the list and thumbnails of particles and a view of the current particle.

— Click on the third “+” Add New Shape to Library icon. It will then be added to the list — and be the active particle in whatever emitter you are working on.

Now, one thing I’m not totally sure of is if PI essentially re-samples the image and creates its own “in-house” version or if it needs the location of your original to be there indefinitely. Meaning:

Let’s say you have your great new .png on your Desktop, you import/add it to your Library and go back to editing, etc. Then later that day, you move it from the Desktop to archive it.

If PI made its own copy, no problem. If not, then that particle won’t work since the .png was moved. My guess is that PI does make its own “in-house” version for it has worked that way for me in a project file (I deleted the new .png at its import location after I had added that as a library shape – and the project still worked).

But I should let Alan address this “in-house version” assumption to be absolutely sure I’m not misleading you.

[Jose Burgos]

Not sure if this visually will work for what you want but have you tried Smoke – Wispy 01 with a record position and change the emission angle to 0/Zero?
Also enable motion blur and maybe increase extra frames to 15. I also played with size, life,number and velocity to get the wispy look to sustain itself.
Here is render of these simple settings;

Jose Burgos
http://www.burgosfx.com