Not to mention the other issues Mylenium brings up regarding 3D space, which has been my single biggest complaint about Particle Illusion use, since these days most of my projects involve AE’s 3D space.Īdd to that the fact that Particular is $100 cheaper, and it’s got a lot going for it over PI. The idea of having to export animations, build your particles, tweak the animation if needed and re-export form AE, tweak particles, etc. Direct integration into After Effects is a key requirement in my mind, given that most particle simulations need to interact with footage or other elements.
The simple truth is, that "wow’ factor fades pretty quickly once you get into full blown production and find yourself having to do fairly ridiculous workarounds to get the results you need. When you fire it up for the first time it has that “wow” factor because immediately you can have smoke, fire, sparkles etc. PI is “cool” and all, but most people see it that way primarily because it comes loaded with presets. I would have to agree with Mylenium on this one. I’m not saying PI is bad, but considering that it’s not really evolving and the integrated AE version, that was promised for 3 years now never seems to come, I would consider it inferior to Particular for someone using AE. Unless you can use PI presets straight from the box (which is rarely possible), it’s speed in rendering and handling of large numbers of particles do not compensate for the workflow issues. Now compare that to PI’s clunky way of having to animate size to get a fake Z-scaling effect, it’s inability to calculate DOF and correct perspective, copy&paste procedures to get over animation paths from AE and things like having to adjust the sprite images in another program, you should clearly see where it’s eating up your production time and ultimately that’s what counts. use other comps as emitters or custom particles.full 3D, meaning you can fly around in your particle clouds and perspective will be correct particleIllusion is a standalone application that allows you to quickly and easily create amazing effects: explosions, smoke, fire, sparkles, motion graphics backgrounds, space effects, creatures.particles can be tied to light emitters.Think of it, what could possibly be the advantages? You can now store Scenes within the emitter libraries.
It works inside AE - what else needs to be said? Just download the demo and use it. Particle Illusion includes a huge collection of presets known as emitter libraries. Most people into VFX probably have pretty hefty computers and they'll just work away blasting particles around! It totally Rocks on my machine (Ryzen 2700, GTX 1660 6GB, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD) but if your system isn't quite up to snuff, it's probably still going to be easier to work with visually than Carrara.I was wondering if anyone here could explain to me why to use Particular instead of PI ? Particle Illusion is pretty much instantaneous, but that also depends greatly on your system. In fact it really takes a heavy toll on resources, scene work-ability and render times. Carrara is really fun for making these things with its particles, but it's nowhere near real time.
Things like smoke, fog or even fires, sparks and explosions or liquids - Things that I might otherwise use Stock Footage for.
Particle Illusion will be a huge asset for making a lot of the various elements we need to make the final image complete. Many of the layers that I'll comp in were intended to be created mostly in Carrara and PD Howler - I'll still be doing a lot of that because both are very strong for these things.