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PI 3 and SE Workflow and Usability
Good day, PI-ers.
I’m using SE and would like to go to 3, provided I can get a better understanding of product usability. I’ve watched some YouTube videos and searched this forum and haven’t found what I am looking for.
My problem is this:
The effects are enormously varied and extremely numerous. They vary significantly in purposed application. Some will work well as a soft texture, others as flat out obnoxious object. Some are in between. In short, the libraries/emitters/particles are absolutely abundant and as such appear to be hard to manage. There are so many, that are so poorly organized and are so varied that artistic efficiency has a tough time flourishing. At this point, I open a library, scour through it, then save it as it’s original name plus some keywords, which so far isn’t all that efficient or helpful.
What I have:
Currently the libraries I have installed are, I believe, all of those available for SE. The names of the libraries are of a date format or some other miscellaneous label, and the items therein are also not entirely accurate as to their contents; and I’m sure that is the nature of an emitter (or whatever it’s called). It’s very hard to put a word on a visual.
What I’m looking for:
I know that I could be more productive, and use the product better, and be more interested in going pro, if the library that displays the emitters was more robust OR if I understood it all better. There’s some explosions here and there, some pixie dust in a few, some trailing smoke and fire in others, and some really silly moving/pulsing circles in others. I want a library or organizational tool which would allow me to easily:
– Choose an emitter for a project, OR
– Review emitters for creative thinking, OR
– Easily move my favorite emitters (after reviewing THEM ALL) to a single library, OR
– ?Any input on libraries, usability, simplifying the organization of the massive amount of effects will be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
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1 Reply
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All valid points.
The one tool you have access to right now is particleView, with it’s search engine.
In pI3, you have:
– emitter thumbnails. Makes it much easier to visually locate emitters in a list.
– thumbnails show in the “load library” dialog for the selected emitter library too.
– Library Manager, which lets you move emitters from any emitter into another library. So you could create a “favorite pyro” library, then go through the existing libraries and move appropriate emitters into the “favorite pyro” lib. Takes some work, but easier than doing it in SE.The 3.0 demo for Windows is fully-functional for 30 days, so give it a try. All owners of SE can upgrade to 3.0 at any time by paying the difference in price between the 2 products.
Hope that helps.
Alan.
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