PFlow or Particle Illusion

[amckay]

Particle Flow is a event driven system, so it's node based. Basically think of it as a bunch of if statements all visually linked togeather. So you can have a particle event making particles spiral upward, then have at the end a statement "if particles age is more than 30, go to event B". So then when a particles age reaches age of 30, it'll move on to the next event that it's told to. Then you could say "upon collision, spawn particles" you're basically feeding it through different statements for it to test itself against, and it means your particle system can branch out into more and more areas and handle more and more scenarios procedurally with less nitty gritty fine tuning of keyframes and spacewarps to get the desired result.

Particle Illusion is a 2D particle system, it's pretty basic in what it does, although powerful for it's pricing an flexibility. It essentially is just a spray system with a lot of controls, that you'll sit ontop of your footage (or render seperately as a pass to put in your comp) to give additional dust, snow or water elements ect. It has extra features such as rotoing and other simple feature which can make things a bit more flexibile, but by no means compare pflow and pillision togeather as they're completely different in their uses in production. PI3.0 is more for designers/compositors, pflow is more for fx td's.

If you want to read a review of PI3 I wrote a pretty in depth one for 3d world magazine recently. There's plenty of documentation popping up for pflow on the web as well, have a look around.

Hope that helps,

Allan McKay

[maxlover]

thanks for ur reply and making mind very clear.
I saw ur vdo its awsome "Particle Dipersion"
man that was:buttrock: :buttrock: :buttrock:
why dont write tut on that on ur site

thanks

[amckay]

yeah I've written over 25 tutorials online and at least 15 video tutorials... So I've got a fair few tutorials out there on particles already that cover very similar topics.

Over the last 6 months I haven't been very active online, I've been over in LA for a majority of that time and have had little time to focus on personal stuff. I'm heading back to Australia in August where I'm hoping to spend at least a solid month persuing my own R&D as well as focusing on a DVD on fx in max. After that I'll hopefully have more time to write freebie tuts ect. But in the meantime a lot of what I've written in the past is all applicable to what I'm doing now it's just probably a bit more hands on to what pflow can do.

But very soon I'll be putting up a lot of stuff, and the dvd will pretty much be a brain dump of everything I know about max particles and all things fx. Brandon Davis (particlefx.com) is releasing a dvd or two soon which are probably well worth checking out too, he's already got a lot of cool stuff online that'll get you jump started.

Hope that helps,

Allan McKay

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