[Elvis Deane]

You can do this by using the Layer Offset, where you pick a point in your video that moves with the camera, animate the Offset point to follow that throughout the clip (or track it in a compositng program, and import that data)

Alan has a post with some examples here.

—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures

[Elvis Deane]

Regular motion blur works fine in a lot of cases, but I find particularly when you have particles with low visiblility, you get that artifacty effect.

Is the button for High Quality motion blur just unclickable? You can try to open the project in pIllusionRender, and see if you can select HQ moblur in there.

—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures

[Elvis Deane]

Go to the Start menu and under the particleIllusion program group, choose the icon that says “Reset Default Settings”. That’ll reset pI’s preferences and should get it working again.

—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures

[Elvis Deane]

Both of these tutorials explain how to do a similar effect.

https://www.creativecow.net/articles/deane_elvis/logoExplode/index.html

https://www.creativecow.net/articles/deane_elvis/disintegratePeople/index.html

—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures

[Elvis Deane]

It’s probably just from animating the Zoom graph, so that it starts small and gets higher as time goes on. There’s also some masking done, so that the trees have been cut out from the original background, and have been animated to dissapear as the fire gets closer.

—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures

[Elvis Deane]

There are a couple of Snowstorm libraries in the November 2003 library that would probably work well as a sandstorm. You’d really just have to change the colours in the particle types to a sandy colour, adjust the Emission Angle so that the particles are going side to side rather than diagnolly, and crank up the Motion Randomness, to make the storm more chaotic.

—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures

[Elvis Deane]

Yeah, that’s right, though you may want to start creating the particles a few frames before 35 so that they fill in quicker once the actor hits the “orbing pose”. It’ll really depend on the footage you shoot, you’ll have to make a judgement call on what looks best.

I made the emitter very quickly, it was about a 5 or 10 minute job. I just started with a blank emitter, and used the basic blur particle shape for both the glow and the dust specks, a star shape for the sparkles.

—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures

[Elvis Deane]

Lowering the Life graph will do this, by cutting the amount of time the particles live.

—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures

[Elvis Deane]

Here’s a video that illustrates the elements I used to recreate the effect:
https://pi.shockingtales.com/videos/orbing.mov
It’s a 7 meg Quicktime

Take one shot of your background without the actor and another shot of your background with the actor doing his stuff.

In your paint or compositing program, import a frame where the actor is standing in the pose he’ll be in when orbing away, and erase everything around him. Save that with an alpha channel so that you have a frame of the actor as white on a black bg.

In a video editing program or compositor, fade between the two shots, so that your actor vanishes over a couple of frames. Render that out, and import it into pI as a background.

In pI, create an area emitter of the orbing, make it the size of your stage, and check Mask Emitter with Images in its Properties. Use the shot you created in your paint program as the mask. Now you’ll have to animate your Numbers graph so that the particles only begin to appear when the actor is ready to leave the scene. The emitter itself has three particle types:

1- Big blue intense particles with very low visibility to create a glow
2- Star shaped particles for the sparkles
3- Tiny particles to create a dust effect.

Now in the Charmed clips, you can see the actor sort of blur away as the particles envelope him. I sorta did this by creating a simple area emitter that birthed particles from the same mask, but used Get Color from Layer to pick up the colour of the actor.

But it doesn’t work that well, and looking at the Charmed clips, they probably use a simple Motion Blur that only moves upward rather than just fading out between the live action shot and the plate shot, causing the actor to blur out of existence, which is partially covered up by the particles.

—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures

[Elvis Deane]

There’s no easy way to do this sort of thing. You’ll probably have to duplicate your original footage onto a new layer and use the masking tools in AE to cut out just the fingers. If they move, you’ll have to animate the points to follow along.

You can do this directly in pI with a blocker object, but the controls in AE are easier to handle.

—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures