Trapcode Particular blocked by 3d Object?

[Bobby Shepherd]

Ah, my biggest gripe with Particular. This plugin is a 2D+ plugin, not a 3D plugin. Therefore, even though it can respect your camera and motion blur settings, it cannot respect lights or 3D layers in a true way. It’s more of an emulation setup, which is why you CAN set an obscuration layer. So….what to do?

The first, more front-end, solution I’ve come up with is the tedious process of duplicating the Particular layer, sandwiching the 3D layer between these, and then adjusting the Near and Far Vanish parameters under Visibility. This should be fine if the distance between your camera and your object stays consistent. If not, then you’ll have to finagle a “lookAt” expression to gauge the distance between camera and object and then to set the parameters based on that.

You can also finalize the rest of your animation and then duplicate the Particular layer, duplicate the Object, set Object 1 to matte Particular layer, then set Object 2 to inversely matte Particular layer 2.

It’s a very powerful plugin –one of my faves–, but it does have its limitations.

Hope this helps,
-B

[Mark O’connell]

Particular needs to be applied to a 2D layer. It’s not true 3D. If you have a 3D layer above the particle layer in the timeline it will block your view of the particles, just as it would block your view of any 2D layer below it.