Particleillusion 3.0

Product Review: Page (1) of 2 - 10/28/03

Particleillusion 3.0 Particle animation software a treat By Stephen Schleicher For many 2D compositors, highly detailed particle systems are hard to come by. For the 3D animator doing detailed particles and rendering them out inside the application can take a great deal of time to calculate. Combining the speed of a 2D particle system with the details found in 3D particle renderers would be the perfect solution. Wondertouch has answered the call with Particleillusion 3.0.

This stand alone application allows you to quickly and easily create hundreds of effects with just a click of the mouse. In fact, you may find that you aren?t getting much work done because you are spending a lot of time just playing with all the gizmos available.

When you launch Particleillusion you will notice it looks much like any other animation program ? Timelines, Channels, Program and Preview windows need no explanation. In fact, I would be surprised if you need much help at all in using this application. It is so easy to use that within the first 30 minutes of use, you will be able to create a complex effect for use in your project.

For example, on my second day of use (the first day being loading the program and playing with all the emitters), I created an effects shot where a window explodes with a shower of flaming debris. When the debris hits the ground, puffs of dust and smoke arise from the ground, some of the grass ignites and starts a small fire, and a huge fire with a large column of smoke rises from the hole in the building.

While this may sound like a complex shot full of many particles, Particleillusion is so fast and powerful, that the entire animation can playback in real-time on something as simple as a laptop. Granted my laptop is a 2.4 GHz, but even with my system I found that Particleillusion uses very little processing power to generate these complex effects. How does it do this? Sprites. Using images instead of rendered particles means that complex effects are created very quickly with very little work.

Since this is a particle system, having a library of preset emitters is very helpful. Particleillusion 3.0 includes over 750 effects ranging from explosions and fire, to warp effects and background animations. What?s more, there are many users out there who are creating their own effects and offering hundreds of free emitters for you to use.

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