Wondertouch particleIllusion 3.0 (part 2)

Initial steps

I have created and initial simple design in Flash based on the Flashvalley hat. The swf size is 300x250 and the design is created using vector graphics. The particle effects I want will appear on the top layer above the graphics, which mean that we need to be able to generate the picture sequence with a transparent background. Also It is important to remember that if you want to import transparent pictures in Flash you need to use either the PNG, TIFF or TGA (TARGA) format.

The are going to go through the following steps in order to achieve what we want to do:

1) load a background image or movie
2) select an emitter from the emitter libraries
3) modify the properties of the emitter to customize it to your project
4) turn off the bg image and render as PNG with alpha channel
5) import into Flash

First I need to import the picture into particleIllusion 3.0, I don't want to export the hat in the final result, I just want to have the picture as a guide and also I want to be able to preview the general look and feel of my special effect. So the very first thing I do is to export my Flash design as an image (it doesn't matter the quality, format or compression since it won;t be exported with the final animation)

I want to use my picture as a guide so the best thing to do is to use it as a background. You just need to right click in the layer panel and select "background image", or just double-click the empty layer thumbnail image (grey rectangle). (pic1) Once you have selected your picture you don't need to change any parameters in the pop up window, just press ok and if everything went fine you should end up with something that looks like on pic2

You will notice a couple of little buttons on the layer itself. At a later stage we will press on the last one on the right (bg) to make the background invisible since we just want to export the special effect.

Setting up the project settings

Now let's set up some parameters for our project. Select View / Project Settings (Alt+P) and in the new window set the Stage size to the size of your original Flash file, in our case, we will set it to 300x250. The Frame rate is set to 30fps by default which is perfectly fine for what we want to do, just make sure that you set it to 30 also. The animation will run for 2 seconds for a total of 60 frames. If you want to create a longer animation you can just change the number of frames on the main toolbar

Adding an emitter

From the library I am going to choose the emitter Transport 03 in the Group 1, not because it is the first one but because it has 2 things I need, the sparks and a kind of halo. I will obviously need to tweak and change a fair amount of parameters but it looks to me like a good seed to start with.  (Note that there with over 1900 emitters to choose from, there are undoubtedly several other emitters that would work too, probably even requiring less modification.  But I chose this one because it does need some changes -- good to show in a tutorial!)

Before adding the emitter to the stage make sure that the select icon is not selected in the main toolbar. Then just click in the middle of your picture on the stage and the emitter will appear on the stage. You should end up with something that looks like on the picture to the left. If you drag the slider between 0 and 60 in the timeline window you will see the current effect in real time on the stage. Before we start working on the emitter make sure that the playhead is on frame 1 in the timeline. When you are ready continue to the next page...