[Alan Lorence]

There is no control for fading background images (in or out), but you can do it with an emitter.

Select a “single particle” emitter, use a square particle shape, make it black, and size it way up so it covers the whole screen. Then you can use the visibility of it to block out the bg movie, which will make it look like it is fading out.

There are good starting emitters in the “misc_01” library, or “Alan_01_05”.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

You can save the emitter in a project file anywhere you want.

You can also save the current emitter library anywhere you want.

I have a feeling I don’t understand what you’re asking.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

You’re probably not going to do this very well in pIllusion. You can try using one of the “into” emitters that seem to send particles toward you (like “into flames”, or something more cloud-based).

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

It’s not a bug — it was designed that way (for some reason). The alpha channel from background images is not used.

Probably something that should be changed in 3.5. =)

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

I think it’s nice work!

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Sorry, I don’t have Paul’s contact information.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Glad you asked. I’ll be releasing 3.0.4 for OS X soon with more bug fixes. We’re working on the Universal Binary versions right now too, but don’t have a release date yet.

On the Windows side, there will be a 3.1 release sometime in the next few months that will add alpha support to AVIs, and also DV support (and probably some small bug fixes too).

3.5 will be released probably late this year on both platforms, but I’m not talking about features yet. It’ll have some cool and useful things in it.

pIllusion AE — our After Effects plug-in — is still in development, and will be released later this year.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

I think you should manually keyframe this, and use “curved” position keys. If you want it to do an “S” shape, create some position keys a few frames apart, then r-click on each point in the stage and make it “curved”. Then adjust so the emitter follows the path you want.

The key is not creating a position key at every frame.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

[Elvis Deane] “With Record Position, you can’t really get the same scaling effect, because there is a keyframe on every frame, so no space to scale down to. You’d have to manually delete half the keyframes and then do it.”

Here’s an idea that might make it easier: use “export position data” to get the data into a text file, then import the text file into a spreadsheet program, or text editor — something that will allow you to easily delete lines of data. (For instance, I use a text editor that has a “line delete” function.)

Then you can import the modified data back into pIllusion using “import position data”.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Finally! Somebody has the “loading file” error! Please email me at wondertouch support and I think I have a solution (a new beta version). I’ve been looking for somebody who has this error so I can test that I’ve fixed it.

Alan.
wondertouch