Work with particles?

[SpaceBoy64]

I know that seems broad, but I have not been able to find a single tutorial that explains what all of the settings do exactly. The controls are not very intuitive.

I was doing an animation which required stacks of money to fall from the sky, so I decided to try using particles for this. I couldn't get the effect I wanted and ended up very frustrated that I had wasted time with this tool.

I made a particle layer and added many copies of the money stack. When I first did this with the default settings, I had stacks of money floating around like butterflies. I wanted them to fall like rain and land on the ground starting at a certain frame. I tried changing all the settings and there was no discernible difference when I changed things. Velocity, no change in speed, although too much would result in no particles at all. Number of particles, no difference. Rate? what does that mean? Damping? There is no explanation in the manual.

The controls don't make logical sense to me. If I made changes and could see how they were affecting the particles I would know how to proceed.

Is there a way to get the particles to slow down and stop?

This was just on inanimate layers. Layers with animation are even more confusing.

I know that this is just a basic particle engine and if I really want nice particles I could get something like Particle Illusion, but I think it should make more sense. It's so frustrating I wont ever use it because I can't make it do what I need it to do.

[slowtiger]

Question is: how much do you know about particle engines? I rarely use that stuff, but found it reasonably clear.

What exactly are you trying to achive? Is that money coins or notes? Creating falling objects with particles is easy. But you can't have them land on an object, or recoil from something, there's no physics engine in AS.

I'd recommend to just animate one fall by hand, and animate the landing in two or three different ways, then duplicate this animation as often as needed and place nicely.

[Genete]

Please read the manual or at last research bit from your self be fore complain...

http://www.lostmarble.com/moho/manual/p ... ayers.html

-G

[SpaceBoy64]

I ended up not using the particles at all because I couldn't control them, and as you pointed out, Slow Tiger, you can't make them stop or bounce on the ground. I eventually animated them one at a time, after I re-started the program and re-loaded my scene. For some reason, AS had slowed to a crawl, so doing the animation this way seemed like it would be tedious and take forever, which is why I decided to try using particles.

Genete: Thanks, but that page is not in my manual, and I didn't know about this web page. It helps a bit, but the results I was getting in my experimentation still didn't seem to make any logical sense.

I have used many other particle engines before, and they all use different terminology for things, for instance "Rate - the rate of acceleration". Usually rate means number of particles emitted per frame, or per second. There isn't any control over this in AS. Some particle systems have gravity control, wind, friction, viscosity, etc.
In AS, Direction and Acceleration are almost the same thing. Direction is the initial direction the particles are emitted, and Acceleration is the direction they move after that. In my mind, Acceleration is more related to velocity, not direction, so it's a confusing term to me. "Gravity" would be a better term for this control. Strength would be a better term than rate. Velocity and rate of acceleration seem almost the same meaning to me, but that's not the meaning in Anime Studio. This is the definition according to that page: "Velocity - the speed that particles start at (a value of 2 will cause a particle to cross the entire screen vertically in one second)"

So, it's both a confusing terminology and lack of ability to do what I wanted it to do.

[slowtiger]

Good to hear you found a solution.

As for the terminology, I don't find it as confusing as you, but maybe that's because I learned Latin once at school.

Particle count and lifetime should be self-explanatory, together they would be what's called "rate" elsewhere: number of particles per given time.

Velocity is uniform speed, like a linear keyframe, this doesn't get faster or slower.

Velocity spread is variation in that initial speed meaning different particles will have different speeds.

Acceleration is getting faster, Damping is getting slower. The two differ:
Damping is a force opposite to the initial direction, like wind or friction.
Acceleration is a force you can direct to what you like, if you set it to 270° you have your plain old gravity (which physically is defined as the acceleration of masses to each other).

That's it in a nutshell.

[SpaceBoy64]

Good to hear you found a solution.

As for the terminology, I don't find it as confusing as you, but maybe that's because I learned Latin once at school.

It has more to do with having used other software that used different terminology. The meaning of the terms here are being used differently, and adjusting these controls doesn't always give the results that would be expected.

Particle count and lifetime should be self-explanatory, together they would be what's called "rate" elsewhere: number of particles per given time.

Still not quite the meaning used in other software. Particle count is overall number of particles being used. Lifetime is how many frames they last before being recycled. Rate should be how many particles are emitted per frame, or per second. Anime studio has no control for this.

Velocity is uniform speed, like a linear keyframe, this doesn't get faster or slower.

Velocity spread is variation in that initial speed meaning different particles will have different speeds.

Acceleration is getting faster, Damping is getting slower. The two differ:
Damping is a force opposite to the initial direction, like wind or friction.

This is what I would expect, except that "Acceleration" in AS is the direction of acceleration, and "Rate" is rate of acceleration.

Acceleration is a force you can direct to what you like, if you set it to 270° you have your plain old gravity (which physically is defined as the acceleration of masses to each other).

This is why this is confusing. It sets a direction rather than an amount.

Here are some of the controls in Lightwave 3D's Particle FX. It's much different. (of course it's a 3D system with physics)


Here are the controls for particles in After Effects:


Particle Illusion is another program with different controls:
http://www.wondertouch.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc7KdKSGwlo

[slowtiger]

Ugh. These look ugly to me. I'm glad I don't have to deal with that, doing a movement by hand is much easier for me ...

And yes, GUI attacks like this support my decision not to do 3D at all ...

[SpaceBoy64]

GUI attacks? I know it looks like a lot of controls, but they're needed.

Here's the final animation. I don't think you'd want to do all these coins flying up and bouncing manually.

The piggy bank is done with Anime Studio, as is mostly everything else.

[slowtiger]

Oh, coins are easy to do - frame-by-frame. In AS it needs a bit more work, but with 3 or 4 generic animations I'd be done, especially for such a short scene.

If you have a 3D application and the knowledge to use it, of course you'd be faster than me.

There is a nice overall flickering of the lines, how did you do that? (And I'd like to know the budget for this, you may tell in PM if you like.)