Depth of Options
Now, when you first load particleIllusion3.0.2, you find that its default library includes 102 emitters over 9 folders. That might at first seem a bit low for a $400 program, until you go online and look at the massive number of free emitter libraries that are available for the program. As of the writing of this review, there were over 75 free libraries available with over twenty-two hundered emitters in them, which makes your available options, right out of the box, pretty darn amazing. (A new free library is made available each month, so this number grows constantly.)
Additionally, you can upload graphics to be used as particles by the emitter, whether these be objects like bones and rocks, or text in the form of letters and words. The customization is nearly limitless.
As I mentioned in “Ease of Use”, you can import a number of different graphics and video types in particleIllusion and, with pI 3.0.2, you can even export certain types of video clips that include alpha channels. This allows you to preserve crucial edge detail when you take it into After Effects or Combustion. Additionally, you can import tracking data from After Effects or Combustion directly into particleIllusion, which is an awesome way to create effects that track with a person or vehicle. This can be a great way to light a person on fire, give them a glowing fist, or have bullet hits blow out a moving car window.
In addition to video improvements there are a few more options that have been unveiled with 3.0.2 that bear mentioning. One new addition is the ability to resize your composition at any time, which is a big improvement over previous versions that would not allow you to resize it once you had begun. Another new feature is the ability to render virtually any size composition easily, through an automatic launching of pIllusionRender. Folks who’ve used past versions of particleIllusion may recall that they had to resize their stage until it was the same size they wanted to export out to. For folks with smaller monitors this was a problem that required them to create a separate version of their project, that was exported out to the separate pIRender module. In the new version, the program will automatically open pIRender if it is necessary, and then close it when it is done, so that pIRender functions more like a part of particleIllusion, as opposed to a completely separate program.
Another great new feature in pI 3.0.2 is the ability to organize your QuickLoad librarie with a second tier folder system. While it won't allow third tier options, makes searching for things much easier in large libraries.
With that said, there is a minor improvement I would like to see in a future version of particleIllusion.
The improvement I would like to se would be the ability to resize or zoom in/out of the timeline, via an editing-style timeline zoom slider, for longer clips. While I know that effects clips aren’t often that long, the fact that particleIllusion can allow smoke and sandstorm shots to be created, warrants the possibility of longer shots. As such, an easily adjustable timeline would be a great improvement. (You can currently zoom in and out on the timeline only by right clicking it and choosing "Zoom", which is more cumbersome than the simple slider I am suggesting.)
particleIllusion's SuperEmittors can allow extremely complicated effects to be generated.
Performance
Our test machine for this review was our 1.86 GHz Core2 Duo with XP Pro x64, 3 Gigs of RAM, and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 graphics card (provided by NVIDIA). In this setup, particleIllusion really rendered at a very speedy rate, slowing down only when we got into complex animations at the 1920 P HD range. Two new things contributed nicely to this speedy response in rendering: the ability to work on the x64 operating systems and the ability to use hardware acceleration pIRender on your video card. While industry experts have told me that the x64 OS isn’t much faster on anything but 3D applications, we have found that to be extremely inaccurate in our use of XP x64, which performs substantially faster than any other version of Windows I’ve used. As such, I was very glad to see that 3.0.2 utilizes it so well. The same can be said of the software customization for pIRender to utilize hardware acceleration, as this really helps make things work so much more smoothly on machines with a decent video card. (While particleIllusion has allowed hardware acceleration since the beginning, pIRender, which is necessary for many of the larger rendering settings, has not supported this before now.)
