Hi.  I'm finishing up the story for my animation project and  hoping to record the voices in May/June.  Some of the scenes are going to need particle effects (fire, explosions, etc) and I was looking at Particle Illusion from Wondertouch.  I was wondering if anybody had used particle illusion before and if they could offer some advice on how best to incorporate it into production.

Thanks,

David

I used it some time ago. The main limitation would be the fact that they are pretty much 2d sprites to be placed on top of your renders.

Is there anything specific you may want to know? BTW I am not an expert with that software, just got to use it a little bit :P

 Thanks for responding.  One of the big scenes involves the bridge of a prototype starship having panel explode and sections catch fire, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this.  I'm planning on using Daz Studio, which as far as I know has no particles.  I guess the big thing is the render size.  Does particle illusion have a limit to the size that it can render out too?  I plan to render everything at HD size and quality.  Also how good is it a layering?  Can I render out to an image sequence with alpha masks to be put together later in photoshop?  What about about the hyperspace effect used in Star Wars to create the streaking lines, or tornados (for a plasma storm sequence)?  Can the program handle these?  Also are the stock effects editable?

Are there other programs that can do these things better or easier?   Especially easier as I'm really new to this sort of thing.

Thanks for all your help.

David

 You don't have a framesize limit. I don't remember if you can import your footage and use that as a reference when creating your particles, but I think you should.

Layering, well there's no layering in PI, so it's better if you render out your particles as separate passes.

All of the stock effects are editable, and you can even replace the sprites in any effect with sprites of your own.
BTW I don't really think you're going to get anything easier than Particle Illusion for the work you're trying to do.

Another approach sometimes is to paint the effect directly over the animation's frames, if you use a paint program with particle brushes, such as Dogwaffle. www.thebest3d.com/pdpdor/tutorials and www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/whatscool has examples

But it can't do all imaginable particle types, especially sophisticated emitters. For that, Particle Illusion may work better, perhaps./ Another  one is Magic Particles by Astralax, see http://thebest3d.com/astralax/index.html

If you need a tool for compositing, perhaps with greenscreen, Dogwaffle Pro can help there too.

Particle illusion has a built in limit of rendering to the largest screen size you can display (allowing for the menu bar) but there's a companion program that ships with it that can render separately at most any size, including 1920x1080. It only supports square pixels, but if you're using strict HD at 24 fps progressive, your pixels should be square in your rendering anyway. You can import footage to use as a reference, but I find that it works better if your reference footage is lower resolution. Once you've got the particles looking good, you can get rid of the background and composite separately (I use After Effects for that).

PI can render to file formats that support transparent backgrounds, and the newest versions can render to video formats that support it (such as AVI with the Lagarith codec). For clips of under ten seconds I usually render to AVI; if longer I usually render to PNG.

Those features are for the full package (version 3). The light, or SE package (version 2) has more limitations, and I haven't used it.

PI can also import position data from an external program, if you have it. For example, it's able to import position data from SynthEyes, and I once wrote a simple script (with some help on the math) for exporting position data from POV-Ray.

Generally, PI will work well for particle effects where the camera doesn't change rotation or zoom significantly. If you use a compisitong program you might be able to put the particle effects on a 3D layer and move it, but that might be problematic. Or, if Daz Studio supports it (I'm not familiar with it) you might be able to render a particle effect as a movie, then texture the movie onto a plane that always faces the camera.

PI comes with lots of particle emitters, and usually there are a new new free ones every month (there's been new releases of versions for use inside After Effects, and that's slowed down the delivery of free goodies a bit).

A really good resource for particle illusion is the forum at Creative Cow (free registration to post; click on "formums" and the link to the PI forum is on the right side about halfway down). Alan Lorence, the developer and driving force of PI, frequently steps in there to answer questions about the product directly, and there are other helpful folks there, too. Some nice tutorials there, too.

I used PI a lot in my animation "Tribute to Godzilla".  It's on YouTube (search words "Poser" and "Godzilla").