How can i 'solidify' more an object/layer?

Question

Hello, i'm using Particular particles on AE, and if i duplicate the layer, the color of the particle seems a lot more consistent, so i want to know if there's any other way (not only for particles) to kind of duplicate the object, but without doing it, because it takes a lot of time more to render.
Thanks in regard.

Answer 1

The look of your particles in Particular has a lot to do with the settings in the plug-in and the blend modes used both internally and for the layer. If you have a layer that takes a lot of resources to render and you want to duplicate it and stack up the effects there are basically two options. The first, which results in a little bit of time savings in render time, is to Pre-compose and then duplicate the Pre-comp in the current comp. In your example you would pre-compose your particular layer then dupe that layer and do what you need with the two copies to get the look you want. This give you a comp where Particular is only calculated once. The second option, which results in a much bigger increase in performance is to render and replace your layer that is using up system resources. This can save a bunch of time when using Particular and doing other things but the animations and effects on the rendered layers are now locked and more difficult to edit. For effects that I KNOW that I'm not going to change and that take up a lot of system resources I almost always Render and Replace. Warp Stabilizing is one effect that is always rendered and replaced unless the shot is only a couple of seconds long. Once Warp Stabilized footage is rendered and replaced I delete the Warp Stabilizer effect because it's a huge liability in the comp even if it's just sitting there and you're not doing anything with that layer or comp again.