[Alan Lorence]

How does AE determine which parts of the image are “in front”? Is it based on channel luminance, or color values, or what? I have some ideas of how to do some cool things, but no time to play.

Lets say that AE uses greyscale values to determine which parts are in front. Then I’d take an emitter (like the tentacles) and make the size over life increase so the particles are biggest when they die. Then I would change the color gradient to go from black to white. Then I’d check “keep in order”, with “oldest in front”. Then I’d wiggle the emitter around a little when recording the AVI.

Another option would be to use the ChromaDepth scheme… is that the right term? I’m going from memory. You wouldn’t need AE for this… just use the example above and make the color gradient go through the ChromaDepth colors. https://www.chromatek.com/ You need the special glasses though.

If you have the glasses already, you can use Gloodle to make some 3D images (Gloodle is a free app on our website).

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

You’re probably trying to use a DV AVI. In order for pIllusion to load DV, you need to install a DV codec. Panasonic has a free DV codec you can install; do a websearch for “Panasonic DV codec”. You’ll find several websites that allow you to download it and give instructions on how to install.

After it’s installed, pIllusion will be able to load DV AVI files.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Hmmm. Another thing you might want to do (if you didn’t already) is to set your project framerate to something high, like 60 fps. You might see the 32 and 30 fps values go up.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Interesting. I didn’t think that file format would make much of a difference. I wonder if somebody has the time to do more of a comparison and find out how much faster/slower different image formats are? I’d like to see numbers too, for instance:

Using 720×480 image sequence, 300 frames:

TGA: xx.x fps
PNG: xx.x fps
JPG: xx.x fps

Maybe even try an AVI using DivX or something. One thing to note is that the first time pIllusion plays an image sequence or movie, it’s slower. After the first time through, Windows has cached some/all of the frames, so it plays faster.

Anybody up for doing this comparison?

Also, I suggest going into pIllusion preferences and checking “do not use texture RAM for bg images” on the OpenGL page. This will probably increase performance as well.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

I’ve been thinking about both of those things. No promises, but I will be releasing updates to 3.0 later this summer.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

I’ve been trying to figure out that problem for a while. I knew that “weird” sizes caused problems with pIRender, but haven’t had time to investigate. Do you know if the width of the image was a problem, or was it the height?

If somebody could do a little investigation for me, and see if widths that aren’t a multiple of 4 are a problem, and if heights that aren’t a multiple of 4 are a problem. (Don’t try both at once.)

Thanks.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

You really need to contact support at wondertouch dot com for that.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Where did you put the files after you downloaded them? You need to use that “load library” dialog to browse to the correct folder, just like loading any other file.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

The Motion Emitters are a one-time collection (for now) — they will not be updated every month. Since it’s using Motion’s built-in particle engine — which isn’t as sophisticated as particleIllusion 3 — it’s similar to particleIllusion SE. But SE is much faster than Motion’s particle system.

When 3.0 is released for Mac, it will be able to load all of the existing 3.0 libraries.

Alan.
wondertouch

[Alan Lorence]

Unfortunately, we didn’t get enough submissions to update the reel for this show. Perhaps we should have been more aggressive and emailed everybody in our customer database, but I don’t like to do that.

Alan.
wondertouch