Elvis Deane
Forum Replies Created
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You can create a blank by going into the Properties of any library, selecting a folder, and then clicking the Add Emitter button.
Or you can grab a blank library from the wondertouch site (here)
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
If right-clicking doesn’t bring up a menu with Background Images as an option, try double-clicking on the grey square in the layers window. That will bring up the same box.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
Particles can pick their colour up from a background image, cover that image up, and then move off screen as you hide the image to reveal the background image on the layer below.
The same techinque is used in this tutorial to blow up a person, but if you were to replace the person with a full background, you can create a transition.
https://www.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=23&page=/articles/deane_elvis/disintegratePeople/index.html—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
The simplest way to do this would be to grab the Blank library, and use the Blank emitter.
In its particle type, turn down the Velocity graph to 0 so the particles don’t move, the Life graph way up so that the particles stay on screen for a long time, and the Number graph up until you have an unbroken stream of particles. To get a zooming effect, animate the Zoom graph up or down.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
How big (in pixels) are the files? That seems really bizarre, I just rendered some standard DV sized TIFs with a ton of colours, and they were in the range of 300kb to 1.3 megs. HD sized images could have much larger file sizes though, I’ve had 4 or 5 meg TGAs when rendering out 1280×720 images.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
From what you said in the first post, I don’t think its a codec issue.
If you begin to render something and then open up a window for another program over that, the part of the pIllusion stage that gets covered up by the window will freeze in the final render. I know this happens to me quite a bit with MSN or Yahoo messenger windows, as well as a lot of other programs when they pop up over my render.
As far as I know it’s an OpenGL issue, because it happens when I do a preview render in 3dsmax or softimage.
And as a side note, Cinepak = bad. It’s a realllllly old codec, good a few years back, but just slow and bulky compared to most new codecs.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
It should work in most cases. If the particles are mostly animated by the Over Life graphs, then just increasing the Life should be enough to slow them down.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
Do you want to blur the edges of the blocker? If so, that’s not possible right now in pI. You’d have to block/mask out the area in a compositing or editing program.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
Those sparkles are pretty complex, so there are a number of things you’d need to do to slow the effect down. Since it’s a super emitter, there is an extra layer of properties to look at.
Below the graphs that say f-Life, f-Velocity, etc, you have a list of other graphs that just say Life, Velocity, Size, Weight, etc. Those are the overall controls of the particle types.
Lowering the Weight, Velocity and Motion Randomness, and increasing the Life will slow all the particles down and increase the amount of time they stay on screen. If you change those same properties on the top most layer of the emitter, it will only slow down the free emitters (the little rings that emit all the particles in a Super Emitter), rather than slowing down the particles themselves.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
It’s really just a matter of bringing footage in as a background layer, from AE or another program, then rendering out a sequence of images with an alpha channel. Once that’s done, you can bring the sequence into AE, and composite it over the footage again, or just go straight out from pI to a video clip.
You can import position data from AE, and use that to drive the position of an emitter in pI, which is a more solid example of how the two work together. So if you’ve tracked something in AE, you can use that data to match an effect to something in your live action footage, without a lot of fuss.
Aharon covers a lot of this stuff on both his DVD and in a number of tutorials on the wondertouch site (under the Integration with Other Software heading)
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures