[Alan Lorence]

Diony,

Please contact me at wondertouch support, so I can discuss emitters with you.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

I have to admit that I do not have the AE skills to do this, and if the experts agree that a “Layer Offset” function is needed in the plug-in, then we’ll address it.

I hope it’s not needed.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Do you have Motion Blur on? You should only use motion blur on emitters that have “(mb)” in the name. Otherwise, performance will suffer, and you will get the “banding” artifacts you’re seeing.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

You should email wondertouch support for help with this.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

search the forum. There was something about the AVI files that Vegas produces that you need to change in a preference somewhere…

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

(for “same old boring questions” do a search of past posts)

You need to install a DV codec so pIllusion can load your DV AVIs. Or you need to convert the DV AVIs to non-DV AVI or image sequence.

Here’s a page with the Panasonic DV codec and some links to others at the bottom:
https://www.free-codecs.com/download/Panasonic_DV_Codec.htm

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Depends on if you import the shape as regular (greyscale) or full-color, which depends if you need the original image colors to be preserved (like the walking mouse emitter). If you don’t need the original image colors, then import it regular (greyscale) and then make the text white on black with no alpha channel. For the Pro Emitters text effects, you’ll want a few different versions: solid letters, outlined letters, etc.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

What exact version number are you running (check the “About…” box) and what OS?

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

[balloonknott2006] “I’ve created my own text/shape in Photoshop, but when I add it to the Library, Or the Shape folder, it won’t let me replace it.
(I hope I’m making sense)”

I’m not sure what you mean, but it sounds like you’re almost there. There is no “replace” button for library shapes. Just add the new shape to the library, then select it, then click the “make active” button.

As a reminder, any changes you make to the library emitters are permanent. In this case you probably do want to make a permanent change (since the word “illusion” or “pIllusion” won’t be useful to you), but whenever I want to make changes to an emitter I add it to the stage, make changes to the stage emitter, then use “Add to Library” when I have it the way I want it. This way I always have the original library emitters.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

My feeling is that 340 MB for an emitter or an emitter library is way too big, and the fact that you keep crashing backs that up.

The problem is that OpenGL is going to have a big problem trying to create and manage 340 MB (or more) of texture memory. I don’t know what the limit is, but I would use your graphics card memory as a guideline. If your card has 256 MB of RAM, then definitely don’t go over 200 MB or so.

I have not done any work on what the maximum size is, as it’s different for every system.

As for using it for video and print, I’d suggest making 2 different versions. Do a simple test with a single particle shape of 512 x 512 or larger, then make the particles fairly small — you’ll see some problems, such as “sparkling” of pixels. OpenGL can scale up and down to some extent pretty well, but when you go too large or too small, you’ll see visual problems.

In your case, I’d suggest managing this huge project this way:

– Break it up into multiple shots, and limit the number of frames that you’ll use for the emitter of each shot. For instance, instead of using 500 frames for a 30 second clip, make it a 10-second clip and use 150 frames. Do this in 3 separate project files. (Don’t add all 3 emitters to the same library, as the project and library share texture RAM)

Alan.
wondertouch