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Boris FX Particle Illusions - FREE


cclarry

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1 hour ago, mettelus said:

Am I missing something, or is there no way to import a reference image/video into this?

That is what they charge you the $300 for the plugin version for.

 

From what I messed around with, seems like you would need to make some approximations then use this as an overlay in a NLE.

 

Has its uses as a standalone but think the real play here is to get you hooked enough to fork out the cash.  🤣

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2 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

Has its uses as a standalone but think the real play here is to get you hooked enough to fork out the cash.  🤣

That was my assumption as soon as I saw the UI. There are a lot of "free" things out and about today just to get people on spam lists, it seems. 🙁

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I've owned particle Illusion since the dark ages.  Seen it go through a few different companies.  And I have a paid license to the Boris FX version (though their yearly upgrade fee is making me think twice about keeping it updated).  It's pretty cool even just the standalone version (which was all there was in the early days).  I'm glad Boris brought it back (the standalone was dropped when it got merged into Boris).  But I'm not sure how I feel about some of the changes.  The old standalone had really weak load a background support and this new one they seem to have removed that completely, even if you have a paid license.  Though for most uses you can just setup the effect you want, render it out with alpha channel and then do the composite in your own app.  I rarely used the broken background stuff in the old standalone, not sure it being missing is that big a deal here really.

Mostly I'd setup small effects (a single explosions/smoke whatever) and then do all the heavy integration in After Effects.

I've been meaning to see about moving over my own PI emitter libraries, but they claim they already did all that work, though I can swear lots of stuff I remember having aren't in the list.

While it's pretty fun to play with, none of the effects really do quite get to photoreal quality levels.  Which I think makes a lot of people upset.  Smoke/fog type stuff though it's pretty good with.  Fire is fine if it's not very close up.  Some of the mograph and special effect stuff was always fun but I'm not sure what use they have.  If you need geometric shapes animating they always had a bunch of nice ones of those.  Build a Iron Man HUD kind  of display stuff.  But without the ability to load a background still (which even the old standalone would do right) making a working computer screen drop-in might be kind of hard.  Though again, render out each emitter to a file and then use the pieces in Resolve/Fusion/etc.

I'd say the free version can be useful if you ever do video compositing kind of work.

 

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