Alan Lorence
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Just import an image of the football as a particle shape. Use a 128×128 or 256×256 image of the football, with an alpha channel of you can.
Alan.
wondertouch -
You didn’t read what I wrote.
Make the stage window larger. Drag the edges, or use Alt-3 to zoom the stage.
You can also use pIllusionRender.
Alan.
wondertouch -
It’s not an effect that you can do easily with particles. You’re trying to make a very smooth line with many small dots. Not the best way.
Alan.
wondertouch -
Check the pIllusion docs in the alpha channel section for more info on getting a good alpha channel (depends on what sorts of particles you have).
Any video editing / compositing software will work. I’m pretty sure that people have posted about free ones here before… hopefully somebody else will remember more details.
Alan.
wondertouch -
Not “bullet fire”, “campfire”. You did make that one.
Alan.
wondertouch -
The “ugly” colors are due to the “remove black bg from RGB… ” option. Uncheck that.
You can load each layer (sequence) into another compositing app and loop them there. The tutorial on our site is for those who don’t have a compositing app.
Alan.
wondertouch -
Make your stage window large enough to fit a 640×480 stage at 100% zoom.
Alan.
wondertouch -
You can get something similar using a “trail” emitter, but it won’t be exact. You can make one of these emitters by setting velocity to 0, increase number to a pretty high value, then draw the emitter path. Probably looks best if you use a shape image that slightly long and thin, and angle it at 45 degrees or so. You may want to use the size over life graph too.
Alan.
wondertouch -
I’ll think about this, and appreciate the input.
There are a couple of problems that I see with this method. First, it will multiply the size of the libraries, possibly many, many times. The duplication of particle shape images (one copy for each emitter) can really add up to some big HD space. Right now, all of the free libraries total up to about 200 MB. Suppose that the new “folder for each emitter” (FFEE) approach results in a tripling of library size (which I think is a conservative estimate). That’s 600 MB, not including all of the overhead of over 1500 emitter folders, and image subfolders. Then add in library backups if you do any editing of libraries at all, and you’re talking a couple of GB of space. Maybe not a lot when you can get a 250GB HD for $100, but I think it’s still a lot.
The second issue is that using the FFEE method you now enable people to corrupt and change emitter libraries, and even emitters themselves from outside of particleIllusion. I really do not want to do that. Does it let the power user do some things that would be harder within pIllusion? Maybe. But the potential for problems far outweighs this in my opinion.
Keep thinking though. A redo of the library system is on the “to do” list.
FYI, Apple Motion keeps all particle images in a specific folder, and they are then accessed by all particle emitters, whether in library or in a project. There are advantages to this, and it may be the solution to the problems with your FFEE method. As I said, I’ll keep thinking.
Alan.
wondertouch -
Look at the January 2006 emitter library. That emitter is in there. Make sure you turn on motion blur.
Alan.
wondertouch