Elvis Deane
Forum Replies Created
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You should be able to export a TIFF with alpha out of Photoshop. It’s one of the few formats that seems to allow alphas from what I remember. If that doesn’t work though, you can grab XNView, an image viewer/converter that’s a free download, which you can use to convert
Vegas can do the fading part just fine, though I think I used After Effects in my example.
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Elvis Deane!
The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to particleIllusion
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Yes, the “block” particle is your problem. You should be able to hide it and the background image to generate just the particles for the dissolve effect, which you can then bring into your NLE and lay over your logo. Depending which NLE you’re using, you can create and animate the mask in there to move across your logo.
The alternate method to disintegrate the logo with an alpha channel is to make the logo burst apart on one frame, as is described in the Disintegrating a Human tutorial.
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Elvis Deane!
The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to particleIllusion
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Any rendering you need to do that’s bigger than the size of your desktop’s resolution, you’ll have to do in pIRender. Once you load the scene file up, the settings aren’t much different than the ones in the pI output options window. Make sure to set the frame range to only render one frame, otherwise you can find yourself waiting a while for it to get done (it renders quite a bit slower than pI).
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Elvis Deane!
The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to particleIllusion
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Actually before you try that, try checking Don’t Use Texture RAM for BG Images in the OpenGL tab.
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Elvis Deane!
The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to particleIllusion
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Your background image should render out just fine as long as it isn’t hidden. It won’t contribute to the alpha channel of a TGA, but the RGB information should be written out.
You may want to try turning off hardware rendering (In the Preferences, click the OpenGL tab and uncheck Use Hardware Acceleration). If the background shows up when you render that way, it means you may need to update your video drivers to the latest certified ones.
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Elvis Deane!
The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to particleIllusion
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There are a few ways to do this. First, you can animate the Number graph and set a keyframe with a value of 0 at the frame you want the particles to stop emitting. That will kill any new particles from being born.
You can also just fade the particles out by setting a key with a 0 value on the Visibility graph. Particles will still be created, but they’ll be invisible.
If you just want to turn the emitter off entirely, you can set a key on the Active graph which acts like an On/Off switch. All the particles from that emitter will vanish at that point.
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Elvis Deane!
The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to particleIllusion
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I think I may do a video tutorial on this because it gets asked every so often and it’s a bit hard to explain in text.
The easiest way to do it is to right-click and go into the emitter’s Properties, select the particle type, then duplicate it (with the button at the bottom of the window). Change the new particle type to a Single Particle and delete any keypoints it has on the Transparency gradient. You’ll now have a single copy of the logo that should stand still (you may also have to select the Spin graph and reduce it to 0 if it isn’t already at 0).
Now it’s just a matter of setting some keyframes in the Visibility graph to fade the new particle type up and down.
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Elvis Deane!
The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to particleIllusion
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There’s no explanation I can think of that loading up an image file wouldn’t work at all, especially if you’ve tried it with multiple files and formats. The only thing I can suggest is that you uninstall and reinstall particleIllusion.
I’d like to help with the staff shattering, but I haven’t seen Return of the King and can’t find any pictures of that scene online. Depending on how detailed you want the shards to be, you might be able to use Aharon’s old Shards emitters from the August 2003 library. You can reduce the Size of the shards and really bump up the Number to get a pretty nice effect.
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Elvis Deane!
The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to particleIllusion
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Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling pI? That’s the next thing I’d try if reset default didn’t work.
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Elvis Deane!
The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to particleIllusion
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You can reduce the Emission Range to 10 or 15, and then play with the Emission Angle so that they fly in the right direction. Sorry, should’ve mentioned that before.
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Elvis Deane!
The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to particleIllusion