Elvis Deane
Forum Replies Created
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Well these are kinda interesting results. It’d be nice to see someone else try a similar test
All I had was a 270 frame sequence at 1280×720 resolution. I shrunk them down for the first part of the test
So while TGAs play faster at a standard resolution than PNGs, they are much slower at a HD res (at least on my system).
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
I find TGAs very slow to use when doing just about anything, not only in pI. Even at 640×360 for the rough renders of the short I’m working on, TGA sequences slow my system down quite a bit whether it be in pI, Vegas, or After Effects, I guess since every frame is a couple of mbs.
Granted, I don’t have a machine nearly as powerful as yours, but it could be something worth looking into, especially since you’re dealing with HD res. You may want to convert the TGAs to PNG just to get a speed boost (there’s a free viewer called XNView that can batch convert TGAs to PNG and keep the alpha channel intact). Even if you just use the PNGs as temp footage and replace them with the TGA sequence again at render time, it might help.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
Here’s a quick 5 minutes test in pI3, where I used Area Mask emitters with an Area emitter on top of an image of the earth with an alpha channel (basically I painted white where I wanted lights to appear, kept it black everywhere else).
https://pi.shockingtales.com/videos/cityLights.avi
The particles would probably look better with a longer life so that they don’t move around so much, but like I said, it’s a quick test.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
There are certain size settings in pIrender that give funny results, and I have never figured out a pattern to it, but I really don’t use it that often. Try adding a pixel or two to the size (I’m not certain, but even numbers divisible by 4 may be best to aim for) and see if the lines vanish.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
pI can only render to the size of your desktop. For something that high res, you’ll probably have to use pIllusionRender. Just save your scene, then open it up in pIllusionRender (which should be installed in the same folder as pI). The render settings are similar to the ones in pI, but because it doesn’t use hardware accelleration, it usually takes a while longer to render.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
I guess it depends what you need it for. Since I got AE last year, I’ve been able to do a lot of things I really couldn’t do before, in terms of tweaking my 3D renders and video clips. It’s not a tool I use everyday, but it comes in handy when I do need it.
The best bet is to download the tryout version and see if it has any tools you need.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
I suggest XVID as an alternative to divx. It isn’t as widespread as DIVX yet, but it’s open source. They both started from the same source, but DIVX went commercial a while back and likes to stick big watermarks in the corner of your renders unless you buy the full version.
https://www.xvid.org/—
Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
The process shouldn’t be any different whether you have a still or a sequence of stills. pI should recognize the alpha channel automatically. Check the Transparency settings of the layer to make sure the alpha information is coming into pI, or perhaps you turned off transparency by mistake (which happens to me all the time, and I don’t notice, then spend 10 minute tearing my hair out wondering what’s going on.)
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
Click on the little BG icon on the layer, which will hide the background image. Then hit the render button, choose an image format that supports transparency (PSD isn’t necessarily your best bet here even if you’re going into Photoshop. The PSD version supported in pI is a little old. Try PNG, TIF or TGA instead).
If you have the “remove black BG” setting checked in your Render Options (which is probably a good idea in your case since you’re hiding the background image), your image will look a little funny when you view it. It will look like normal once you copy and paste it onto a background image in PS though.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures -
At https://www.wondertouch.com/downloads.asp#IEL
Download the .zip files, and unzip them into your particleIllusion folder. Then when you right-click and choose Load Library, they will be available to load.SE can load the libraries that were created before September 2002.
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Elvis Deane!
The particleIllusion FAQ
particleIllusion Resources and tutorial CD
Astounding Adventures