[Elvis Deane]

I almost google image searched for some reference, but I’m betting that woulda been a bad idea
Here’s some for the swinging tail racer type. I’m not too sure what you mean by the running one.
https://pi.shockingtales.com/ipf/racingTadpoles.zip

You can adjust the shape of the head and tail in the Size over Life graph.

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

[Elvis Deane]

For paint programs, there’s The Gimp and Paint.net

As for compositors, I don’t know of any free ones besides Zwei-Stein. Avid has a free editing program that may have limited compositing capabilities, but I don’t know for sure.

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

[Elvis Deane]

Version 3 comes with a standalone renderer that will allow you to render something that big. Here’s a page with info on it:
https://www.wondertouch.com/illusionrender.asp

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

[Elvis Deane]

I’m not sure of any tutorials online, but that subject is covered in the help file, in Tutorial 4, under the subject Area Emitter Masks.

Here’s an emitter that does the raindrop explosions. You may want to lower the Life of the Droplets particle type down to make it more realistic.
https://pi.shockingtales.com/ipf/rainStrikes01.zip

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

[Elvis Deane]

Just click the red Save Output button in the play controls, pick a filename and choose AVI as a format. Once you select what frames you want to render, pI will write out a video clip.

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

[Elvis Deane]

Here’s a post Aharon made a few days ago that explains basic text creation and import.

For Text:

you need to create an image of your text in a program like Photoshop.

Just make sure it the size of the image is in multiples of 16 – i.e. 128×256, 32×256 (or any variation).

Make the letters white, and the BG black, and save as a Tiff or TGA.

Then in the emitter properties go to the Change shape tab and then import the image (via one of the “Import Image…” buttons).

For more on this, just check out the pIllusion help files: Tutorial 3: “Particle Shapes”

If you’re using a multi-colour logo rather than just simple text, you’ll probably want to save it out of Photoshop with an alpha channel rather than just making it black on white.

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

[Elvis Deane]

The misc library is one of the reorganized libraries that comes with the CD version of the software. If you only bought the download, then you can get the money emitter in the alan 00-10-11 library and some coins from user 02-03. There’s also another coin emitter by Barrie Williams, but I’m not sure which library it originally came in.
Just grab the libraries from the wondertouch downloads page

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

[Elvis Deane]

It would help a lot if you were able to post up a copy of the scene for us to have a look at. If you could include just one frame of the background sequence rather than the whole thing so maybe someone here can figure it out.

The only reason I can think of for you having any problems with this is that pI doesn’t output the alpha channel of the background image when you render something out. It will render the the colour of the background image into the final image, but only the alpha channel of the particles.

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

[Elvis Deane]

You can use an image sequence or avi as a particle shape, but there are a few things to think about:

– The more frames in the animation, the more memory it’ll eat up, so having a lot of particles with a really long animation as their shape will slow things down quite a bit. I’ve used 50 or 60 frame sequences, and those work fine, but adding a sequence of a few hundred frames may cause slowness.

– Once the animation hits it’s final frame, it’ll jump back to frame 1 again. So it’s best to use looping sequences.

But using looping animations (a nice example being the bird or glass/debris emitters that Aharon made), or just timing the Life of the particles so that they vanish before the sequence starts playing over again can be effective. You do have a bit of control over the timing of how the sequences play (I think all the info about particle shapes is in Tutorial 3 of the help file)

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

[Elvis Deane]

To import video, right-click in the Layer’s window and choose Background Image.

Here’s an old post that explains about text

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