Particle Illusion is a very simple yet advanced software. With it you will be able to create just about any kind of special effect that can later be imported to other great programs such as Flash, After Effects and even Photoshop.

Now, when I said "simple yet advanced" i meant that it in fact is fairly easy to grasp, especially for those familiar with Flash or just about any other motion graphics software.

In this tutorial i will walk you through the basics of PI and how to use it.

 

1)      Stage – This is the working area that you will create and preview all of your creations.

2)      Timeline -  Quite self explanatory

3)      Preview -  Here you can see a preview of the emitter in action

4)      Emitter Browser – Choose or load emitters by Right Clicking -> Load Library

5)      Layers -  Just like in Photoshop or Flash, this is a layers pallet, you can also load movies or images by double clicking on the layer or Right Clicking -> Background Image

6)      Parameters – Here you can edit the general appearance and behavior of the emitters.

7)      Toolbar – Load, save, paste and perform all of the basic functions along with some unique to the particle illusion.

 

Note that Right Clicking works in all of the above listed parts of the PI interface, getting familiar with functions that can be brought up by Right Clicking could improve your work flow quite a bit.

Now I would like to go over the functions of a toolbar in a greater detail; we are going to break it up in 3 bits.

Here are the basic functions, that are pretty much self explanatory, from left to right. I strongly suggest you learn these shortcuts and use them at all times as they are nearly universal and are the same in most of modern software:

●         New (Ctrl+N)

●         Open (Ctrl+O)

●         Save (Ctrl+S)

●         Cut (Ctrl+X)

●         Copy (Ctrl+C)

●         Paste (Ctrl+V)

This section is unique to PI and introduces some features you may not be aware of:

●         Project Settings (Alt+P) – This is where you can not only edit the size of your stage(working area) but also edit the frame rate, enable and edit motion blur and change the background color. You can also save and load custom settings. Note: If you do increase the size of your stage you might have to adjust the widths and heights of the interface panels of PI to view the whole working area as it may end up being partially covered up.

●         Select (A) – this is the actual selection tool you will use to move around your particle emitters and edit paths / bezier curves.

●         Add Deflector / Blocker / Force – we will not get into these features for now; yet i encourage you to go ahead and give them a try, they do exactly what they sound like.

●         Show Particles (P) – Switches the particles on and off on the stage, very helpful if you are working with paths or emitters and wish to disable everything else.

●         Move (M) – You got it, it moves stuff around. =]

This set of tools is pretty much the same as the Move tool, yet Nudge offers you a lot more precision.

Last but not least we have our Playback Box. With it you can play, stop and rewind your animations to preview them and save the output with a Red (Record) button. Please note that the Loop feature will not actually loop your animation in its final output, it will only loop the preview. By changing the numbers in the Start and End Frame you can add or remove frames from your animation. 

Thank you for reading my “Particle Illusion Interface Overview” tutorial.

Hope it was helpful to some of you in one way or another, best regards.

NextExile

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