ParticleIllusion 3.0

ParticleIllusion is probably one of the most instantly beautiful packages on the market. As soon as you load it up, you’re presented with a pink, whirling sparkler that you can drag around the preview window. Simply click on a different particle preset and your sparkler changes to a smoke trail, an explosion, a firestorm, a waterfall or (inexplicably) a cartoon mouse. In fact, so appealing is the act of bringing up the hundreds of preset effects (750 of them, actually) one by one and dragging them around the screen, that it’s quite possible to waste most of the day doing it.

Once you finally get bored with making patterns with light, you realise that ParticleIllusion isn’t just a pretty face. By simply opening up each preset, you can adjust every aspect of it: the number of particles created, their weight, spin and speed. You can also edit the shape of the actual particles themselves – either picking them from a pretty comprehensive list or loading in your own. You can import stills, or animated sequences, too; so, for example, you could use an animation of a flying bird to create a flock, or a single puff of smoke to build a plume.

Many of the alterable functions of the particle system can be animated. Simply click on the appropriate function and you can quickly keyframe it with a rubberband graph, then watch the results of your work in real time as you alter the effect. Most of the presets are made up of multiple emitters, and you can time and control each one separately. You can also download hundreds more presets from the Wondertouch website, or create and submit your own.

Real-time playback of your effects via OpenGL is very good (depending on the power of your graphics card), and you can enjoy a great view of most effects. Admittedly, complex combinations involving many large particles can be slow, but then the results are nowhere near as slow as similar effects generated in a 3D package.

Rendering is done in exactly the same way as the realtime playback, so it’s very fast, and what you see is what you get. As a comparison, a volumetric explosion using LightWave or 3ds max often takes hours to render, whereas a similar look can be created in ParticleIllusion in minutes. This comparison is slightly unfair, because ParticleIllusion doesn’t deal with actual 3D objects, and your smoke or flame won’t create light and shadow on either itself or on other objects. But as a cheat the results are superb.

New to version 3 are some neat features. The most important of these is the ability to create Super Emitters, which don’t create particles directly – they create other emitters. This enables you to produce multi-layered explosion effects, or add levels of complexity and detail to simple particles. Also new is the Get Colour From Layer option, which, if you load in a background image or movie, makes the particles act as a kind of distortion effect, producing heat hazes, water effects, and particle transitions, as well as Matrix-style bullet wake effects. V3 introduces forces (such as wind) which can direct your particles, and Area Emitters which enable your particles to be produced from any shape (see boxout).

Once you’ve designed the look of your particle system, you can add it to the main project window. Here, you can add it to a background image, and you can animate its position and rotation. The compositing isn’t up to the standard of After Effects, but if you want to, you can always render the particles with an alpha channel and do your final composite elsewhere.

It’s not 3D and it lacks motion-tracking facilities, but this app remains a must-have for anyone in the effects industry looking for an affordable quick-fix solution.