Alan Lorence
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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You’re running the pIllusion 3 demo (trial), right? If so, you can just copy the pIllusionRender.exe file (in your particleIllusion 3 folder — it would be in “Program Files” if you used the default installation location) and paste it in the same location, giving it a new name of “pIllusionRenderDemo.exe”. (you’ll end up with 2 copies of the same file with different names)
Alan.
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First thing to do is get the latest drivers from nvidia.com. This could make a big difference in speed.
And make sure pIllusion is set to use hardware acceleration in the OpenGL page of the Preferences.
If you need to add a lot of emitters, add them in layers. Add a couple, render out with alpha, then replace the emitters with the rendered version, then add more emitters, etc.
Finally, you can zoom the stage out to speed things up a bit. I do this sometimes on my slower machines.
Alan.
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Are you using particleView and it’s search feature?
To me it’s much more useful than the catalog, which I rarely (never?) use.
Does anybody find that the catalog is better than particleView’s search function in some cases?
On a technical note, IE7 takes quite a while to load the catalog page as it is now. I wonder what it would do with 2000 animated gifs? Plus, I currently make the catalog by exporting the existing emitter thumbnails — to make animated gifs of all emitters would take a huge amount of work.
We’ll see what we can do in 4.0.
Alan.
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The “remove black background…” option has nothing to do with the alpha channel — it affects the RGB channels only (and is the difference between a “straight” and “premultiplied” alpha).
If you select a codec that can support alpha (I like “Lagarith” or “Huffyuv”), check the “save alpha” option, and render, the output AVI will contain an alpha channel. You can verify this in pI3 by starting a new project, setting the background color to something non-black, then loading your rendered movie as the background image for a layer. You should see the background transparent.
I think this is probably some setting in Vegas that is set to “ignore” the alpha channel in the AVI. I don’t use Vegas enough to know where those settings are without doing a lot of searching.
Alan.
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Quality of exported clip doesn’t matter, since you’ll only be using it in pIllusion. You’ll use the original clip in Premiere.
Alan.
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Here’s one that was sent to me by by MARCELO SCHATZMANN, filmmaker and director (BIOFILMES)– all sorts of particleIllusion in there, and very well integrated.
https://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=Fiq-y8KEc3s
Alan.
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This is something better handled by wondertouch support, so please email support at wondertouch dot com directly.
Alan.
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There’s no existing emitter for this, but you can modify an existing one easily.
Load the “follow me 2” emitter from the “trailers_01” library (also in “alan_00_06” if you have that instead). Put that emitter on the stage, then open its properties dialog.
Click the “particles” tab, then the “colors” tab
R-click in the color gradient and “reset”
Select the first (only) color point in the gradient which is now black, then make it white.
Then you can make some other adjustments — maybe set “size variation” to 0, uncheck “intense”, increase the “number” of particles, etc.
Increase “life” if you need the particles to live longer.
Alan.
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Both SE and 3.0 can use larger stage sizes than 640 x 480 — change that in the “project settings” dialog.
In SE you’re limited to a size that you can fit in the stage window at 100% zoom though, so this means that to get larger sizes, you may need to maximize SE and then manually resize the stage window as large as possible.
In 3.0, this resizing is automatic, and it will use pIRender if needed, so you can render larger sizes without having to resize any windows.
Alan.
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Nice tutorial. I missed something with the all-black layer you painted on though — you were painting the alpha channel (“mask” in Paint Shop Pro terms), right? How exactly did you do this? Maybe I need to watch the video again — I was reading the text and probably missed what you did on the screen.
Also, PNG alpha channel is not limited to 2 colors. It’s an 8-bit channel just like TGA. It may be that PSP 7 limits it to 2 color for some reason.
Alan.