The particle engine, however, is definitely not user-friendly (as described in more detail below). I couldn’t get the Foam module to work as I wanted it to; I was hoping to get some cool rotating DNA strands or bicycle spokes, but the little crystals just bobbed in some strange fashion that was absolutely nothing like I’d expected.
However, I was easily able to explode some simulated stained-glass video footage in a variety of ways with the Triangles module, and I was also able to blow up a crystal cow with the 3DObjects module with little effort. And that made me giggle like a school-girl for a while, so I guess it all balanced out in the end.
Depth of Options
LensPro III really does only one thing: it makes glass and crystal objects. However, it does this incredibly well, and the amount of customizations you can make to the objects are, to be frank, overwhelming. You can adjust everything from the type of light source shining on the object, to the way it refracts that light, to the color of the glass, to the opacity or reflectivity of the object. You can make twenty-two types of objects. All of these shapes can be adjusted in numerous ways: you can change the size, thickness, rotation, sharpness of the borders, number of facets, and literally dozens of other parameters. And all of these parameters can be animated by keyframes!
To be honest, I usually just ended up using the default settings for my tests; they looked great to me, and I didn’t see much reason to make adjustments. However, it’s nice to know that you can make such minute changes, and I suppose this ability would come in handy if you needed to match a specific lighting setup to a pre-shot or pre-rendered scene.
The particle engine, however, just goes overboard. I counted 48 parameters that can be adjusted and animated just in this sub-section alone. That’s just too much for casual use, especially when the names of the parameters aren’t very intuitive. With that many options, I really couldn’t figure out how to get the particles to go where I wanted. And in the Foam module, where the particle engine seems particularly important, this became a real liability. I just wanted to make stuff that looked as cool as the examples on their website, but unfortunately, I couldn’t make it happen. Some presets would have been greatly appreciated, if only to have a basis from which to make adjustments from.
AE’s built-in Particle Playground, for example, also has a ton of animation options, but they’re arranged in a much more intuitive manner, making it much easier to shuffle the particles to where you want them to go. Granted, even that plugin has a steep learning curve, but it’s simple enough, and laid out well enough, where you don’t have to constantly reference the manual every time you want to make an adjustment. Of course, Particle Playground isn’t going to give you a bunch of shiny crystals flying around the screen, no matter how much you tweak it, so I guess it’s a trade-off….
Performance
I’m running a Windows XP-Pro home-built PC with an Athlon XP 3200+ processor and 1GB of RAM. With this configuration, I was able to get a little faster than one second of rendering per frame for some keyframed “explosions” on the Triangles module. Compared to some other plugins, this is very acceptable.
Furthermore, LensPro III offers various options for speeding up previews, including line and wireframe renders. You can also adjust the Quality switch in After Effects to “draft” or “wireframe” for even greater preview speed.
