Once you’ve selected the particle emitter you would like, you simply click the main stage and you can place the starting bulls-eye where you would like. After that, move the frame slider where you would like and slide the bulls-eye to the next location you want the particle generator to move to by that point. Add as many keyframes as you would like, with linear or curved lines, to get the exact motion you need. After that, export out your movie to your favorite compositing program; whether After Effects, Shake, or Combustion. From here, it can be combined in any way you like. (You can also import footage and stills from a variety of sources, as well as motion tracking data from After Effects and Combustion; but I’ll speak more on that in the “depth of options” section.)
Now, while the basics are very easy to get into, more complicated effects that simulate particles passing behind or being deflected by objects require the use of blockers, deflectors, and/or forces to create. For these more advanced effects, the learning curve gets a bit stiffer. Luckily, there are a number of tutorials included with the software to get you up to speed pretty quickly.
Stylized credit sequences can be created with a multitude of graphic elements, including pictures and words.
Despite the logical and intelligent learning curve for this program, there are two issues with the overall workflow ease of use.
Contrary to most Windows and Mac-based programs, you can’t drag and drop your emitters on the timeline or staging area. Instead, you must select an emitter and then click on the stage separately to place the emitter. While drag-and-drop doesn’t work for the main stage, it does work for the library. This means that you can accidentally drag and drop your emitters into different locations in your library by holding the left mouse button down. This in turn means that, if you’re like me, while you’re learning this fact, you’re badly disorganizing your library in the process. (And, if you’re like me, you’re probably so busy concentrating on the fact that your drag and drop isn’t working that you fail to notice that you’ve dropped library items in other folders until after you’ve royally thrashed them.) I would like a future version of particleIllusion to come to the drag and drop mindset of Windows and Mac, allowing you to drag emitters from the library to the stage.
The other issue I have is that the cool, text-based particle generators require graphic versions of text you wish to use, to be uploaded into the program. Because these are graphics, you must open up Photoshop or a similar program to create them and then re-import them. (Additionally, since they are not vector based, this can lead to pixelation issues unless you import very high-rez versions of your text.) I would love to see a future version of this program that had a vector-based text generator, so that you could type in new text directly inside particleIllusion.
A new feature in particleIllusion 3.0.02 is the ability to scale the current project at any time. This is a huge improvement over its predecessor, which made you select the size at the beginning and gave you no options to change after that.
