Particle playground problem

Hi all
I have a problem with Particle Playground in AE 9.0.2.42.
The particles shown on full screen resolution are different from the ones on other (half/quarter) resolutions. For example i use a boundary wall to constrain the (custom mapped) particles and on the half and lower resolutions the behavior is excellent but when i switch to full the particles don't behave correctly (they tend to group in 10's or more).
Hope it makes sence...
Any ideas?
Thanks

You won't be disappointed if you purchase Particular. And there is a 2.0 upgrade coming up (see a demo here), but according to this PDF you'll only pay a dollar more if you buy now and upgrade later than if you were to wait to buy the full 2.0 version.
As for Particle Playground, I suspect Adobe includes it for the sake of supporting older projects that might have used it, but I doubt they consider it a serious offering today.

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Trying to use Particle Playground

I just updated from CS4 to CS5 and suddenly I cannot use the Particle Playground effect. It worked just fine under CS4. Now...nothing.
I am on a MAC intel MacPro running 10.5.8 with 2 X 3.2 Quad core Intel Xeon and 10GB Ram
Any ideas would be appreciated.

This is quite an old post, but I am having exactly the same problem - particle playground produces nothing .
I'm running CS5 (AE 10.0.1.19) on a Mac Pro 2x 2.4GHz Quad Core Xeon with 12GB RAM & OS10.6.4
Even if I just create a new project, then new comp (any size, it makes no difference), new solid (comp size), then effect>particle playground, I get nothing - not even the stream of red dots that it produces by default. BUT, when I do a RAM preview, the info panel does its usual report of "number of particles: 116" etc. so it's actually calculating the particles, just not displaying them. I've tried tweaking the particles per sec, the grid settings, etc. etc....but nothing. I used to use particle playground a lot on CS3 & CS4, so it's not user error. I've tried tweaking the memory settings and turning multiprocessing and OpenGL off and on.
BUT - I have just discovered, if I use a layer map instead of the default particle dot, it works fine. So it's not as huge a problem as I first thought, as most of the time I use a layer map for the particle. But it would be nice to have if fixed!

Crashing with Particle Playground: Color Picker.

Running Mac OS X 10.6.5, MacBook Pro.
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I downloaded After Effects, running on Trial.

Have you installed the After Effects CS5 (10.0.1) update? That update fixes a lot of problems.
If installing that update doesn't solve the problem, then try this: Remove the Mthread plug-in before starting After Effects (e.g., by dragging the plug-in to the desktop). The plug-in is in the following folder: Applications/Adobe After Effects CS5/Plug-ins/Extensions

Particle Playground: trouble with wall and particle image

Hello Friends,
I'm fairly new to all of the fancy stuff in After Effects, particularly particles, but I've had a lot of success so far, and just one problem that I can't seem to figure out. Perhaps someone here can help me.
I'm trying to create a clip of a cartoon bride and groom being pelted by rice. I've got the image of the cartoon bride and groom, and it looks great. I then created a new solid layer and applied the Particle Playground effect, and positioned the cannon so the particles come in from offscreen (around the 10 o'clock position). I tried creating masks on the side of the bride and groom's heads (drawn with the pen tool) for the rice to bounce off of, and that part seemed to work, too. At this point, I have the default red squares as particles, and they're bouncing off of the masks just like I want them to, but they don't look anything like rice. I change the color to white, and it looks a lot better, but still not as much like rice as I'd like.
Now, I figure out how to use a layer map to create particles from an image. I use a new shape layer and use the shape tools to create a single grain of rice (a white elongated ellipse with a black stroke). I then set the layer map controls to my rice grain layer, and adjust the scale properties of the rice grain until I have particles that look perfect. Hundreds of grains of rice, all the right size and shape, and they all look great but they're all oriented in the same direction, so I've got to make them move in a more random way. My next step is to animate the rice grain layer to rotate three times in one direction, then back three rotations over the course of three seconds. I then set the parameters to create the particles from a random starting point in the three-second layer. Success! The rice looks like rice! It's the right size, shape, and rotates with the right degree of randomness!
But the boundary mask isn't working anymore. The cannon is shooting the rice particles everywhere but where the mask is, so I get none of the desired bounce and interaction. There's an empty swath where no particles are being generated, so there are particles above and below the wall mask, but none moving directly toward it as I want. It's as if the mask is keeping the cannon from creating particles.
I tried moving the mask away from it's original position, and it affects the creation of the particles, but not in a way that makes sense to me. I tried decreasing the diameter of the cannon, and it behaves almost as if the mask is right next to the cannon, not where it appears in the comp.
Does anyone have any ideas about this? It seems like I'm really close...

Technically, in a proper Image Sequence, all images are the same size/aspect ratio.
What you'll need to do is make on set (vertical or horizontal) a new size, to fit inside the other. The Particle Emitter will matte it's images to one or the other, which ever comes first.

Question regarding Particle Playground.

I'm trying to use particle playground to turn a logo into particle and when I did the logo's alignment is off.
This only happens when I precomp the layer and then apply the effect. It is properly aligned when I apply
on the layer directly. What is the problem? Is there a way I can apply the effect on the Pre Comp layer without the alignment
going off?
Please advice. Thanks

There are actually a few particle effect plug-ins included with After Effects. See this page for a list.
There are a lot of great particle plug-ins for After Effects. Trapcode Particular is very popular, full-featured, and well supported with tutorials and such. If the plug-ins that ship with After Effects don't do what you need, then Particular would be a good thing to check out.

Can't see particles in Particle Playground

I'm unable to see particles being created by the Particle Playground effect. I can apply the CC particle effects with no problem, but when I try it with Particle Playground I just get a black screen. The info window counts the particles and the timeline drags like it's trying to render, but nothing is visible. I've tried the Cannon, the Grid and the exploders. I've tried resetting the multiprocessing preferences. I've even reinstalled After Effects and run all updates, but no dice.
Any ideas?
Here are the specs
Adobe CS5
Mac OSX 10.5.8
Mac Pro
2 x 2.26 GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon processors
16 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 RAM

Thanks! Here are the screen shots.

Particle Playground in RAM preview

Using AE CS3 I've built a sequence involving the explosion effect of Particle Playground. I adjusted the Velocity Dispersion parameter to get a good expansion rate for the particles, using RAM preview at 50 percent resolutiion as a test bed. To my surprise, when I rendered the project, the particles flew at many time the rate seen in RAM preview. Any ideas as to why this happened or how to get the RAM preview to faithfully reflect the real render?

> Trapcode Particular is the third party plugin I use more than any other - it is quite simply the most useful plugin I've ever bought for AE,
b and worth every cent.
if you have the dime, everything will be fine...
just a note for the guys from the dev-team who probably may stumble over this thread: i'm not paying for Ae using it on a "experimental basis".
There are two presumptions: you are not capable of properly coding or lets say, having your software-development under control, or you are simply NOT WILLED to take a look into your code to see what else can be managed because you're so distracted by having this app work in somewhat future of Apples somewhat architecture?
i'm in serious anger with Ae every day using it. i don't think i need a higher degree in mathematics just to be able to control a pretty self-explanatory software. if software lacks in usability thus lacking in performance, why someone should spend any future dime on it?
I believe it has all to do with bureaucracy and fund, just to enhance a software systematically from version to version, not pushing the features at once whilst having them already in the top drawer since ages.
it's pure business. it has nothing to do with customer satisfaction nor with customer experience.
though, this forums and all it's peoples input from all aspects did had an impact on development. without it, we still would stuck in the middle 90ies.
Thanks for sharing.
personally i got tired of all this technical drawbacks. it caused me a lot of damage to my health, non billable hours and suffering in my
profession as a digital artist which i've started with pure passion.
I will quit my job and start doing something that makes really sense to me and my fellow men rather than hanging around for days/nights in front of a screen filled with problems.
I release myself from this forum. i wish you all good luck for the future and keep pounding.
cheers,
Thomas

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I have been creating files in particle playground for months now, but suddenly I can no longer see the particles displayed in the viewer. It is as if the particles have no opacity and they are invisible. But the opacity is at 100%. Why can I not see the particles in particle playground anymore?

Thanks for responding to my post. I appreciate that. In terms of method, I'm simply just trying to see particles emit from the red circle in the center. I merely made a red solid, and then Effect>Simulation>Particle Playground. I moved 8 seconds in the timeline to demonstrate that there are not any red particles emitting. The particles seem to be invisible.

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2) Any suggestions for a better way to do this? (For example, is there a way to keyframe changes in a persistent property map set to opacity?)

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Mylenium

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I am using CS5, After Effects, Win 7. I have created an effect of someone sprinkling snow on a scene which loooks pretty good but I'd like the snow to fade to nothing over a period as it falls. I know I saw in another tutorial an option called something like dies or fades and a timespan selection. However, I cannot for the life of me find it. Can anyone help ?
Regards,
TL.

You will have to create a property map if you use Playground, which could be as trivial as a circle near the emitter that "imprints" a lifespan onto each particle. You will have to pre-compose the map. Otehrwise you might indeed try to look into otehr effects, though getting the snow to rest on anything will then be much more complicated...
Mylenium

Adobe After Effects CC Particle World Problem!

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Here is a link to show you the problem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqIFYNx64YM

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/733058
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After effect particle world problem

Hi, i'm on after effect cs3 on a mac 2x2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon. I've done a project in AE and when i try to generate particles with CC particle world (that was installed when i installed the software) AE crashes. We have a second computer in the studio with AE as well but on this one CC particle world works fine. Would you know what could be the problem. By the way i went on the Cycore system FX web site to see if there was an update, there was one but it replaced my CC particle world with a new one but one that i need to buy a key to activate (when the original one was supposed to work with AE on original install) We have different CS3 packs for every computers. Thank you.

Please read this: http://aeerrors.myleniumstuff.de/?p=849
This is a known issue with CS3 on Nehalem Xeon MacPros. Except for buying the HD version of the Cycore effects or turning off hyperthreading as described on my pages (no guarantees, I only got this info from someone else), there is no fix for CS3. However, these issues have been addressed in the CS4 9.0.1 update, so consider upgrading to CS4.
Mylenium

Particle world problem

Hello, so I'm trying to work particle world and the effect is all of a sudden really small. When I apply it, It's a tiny spec of sparks in the center of the screen, and I can't seem to get it back to the way it was. I want to change it back to this: http://www.studiodaily.com/images/articles/5800_1135877205.jpg Can anyone help?
Thanks.

Thanks Mylenium,
I'm really new to After Effects, so I'm still getting used to it.
Thanks again,
Izzy_91

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In attempting to export a project from After Effects, I end up with video with dimensions that are too small and won't fill up the screen in my Final Cut video; regardless of the resolution, cannon, etc that I set, I can't get the export to overlay in Final Cut Pro at the correct resolution, 1080i. I've been searching for a solution on the web, but cannot find an answer.
Where would I find the setting in After Effects to increase the dimensions of the video? Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Thanks in advance!
~C

You are exporting at 1920x1080 and it doesn't fit?
Shane

Quad G5 Stability Problems / Slowness / Upgrade options?

Well, this is going to be a long post, so bear with me.
First, I'm totally Steve Job's dream. I bought the Mac Mini and it was a complete gateway drug, now I have a brand new PowerMac G5 Quadcore something or other. Okay. I use it for motion graphics work, mostly After Effects, but I've also got Final Cut Studio installed. I've had the G5 for a month now (I know it's almost obsolete by Mactel, but AE and Photoshop won't be available on Mactel for, like, eternity, so I upgraded early.)
So that's the setup. My problem is, the G5 quadcore tower is way less reliable than the Mac Mini was! The thing that impressed me about OS X and the mini was that nothing ever went wrong. I could be burning a DVD, listening to something on iTunes and doing a complex AE render, and Mac mini would figure it all out. I never had to reboot Mac mini unless a software update demanded it.
I've had two occassions now where the G5 tower completely crashed. I'll go over them in details.
The first time, I was using AE and previewing on a camcorder/TV over Firewire. So the set up is, PowerMac -> camcorder (Firewire) -> TV (S-video).
Okay, the first thing I did that might be weird is: I was running activity monitor during my AE renders to see the extent to which 4 cores were actually being used. I discovered to my surprise that even during my most complicated renders, PowerMac was only using 50% of its processing power. It engaged all 4 cores, but each of them never went over the 50% or maybe 60% utilitization. So either AE just isn't optimized, or there's an upgrade I should perform. (See details below.)
Okay, next weird thing. I put PowerMac to sleep with the camcorder still on, and woke PowerMac up a little later to continue working. Now I'd left the camcorder on this whole time. When I went back into AE and told it to preview to the Firewire again, PowerMac froze. I got the spinning beach ball. I thought, "Oh, sometimes that happen, I'll just wait and let PowerMac sort itself out." An hour later, though, I still had the spinning beach ball, so I had to reboot.
A day or so later, something similar happened. I was doing a complex render in AE. I had 20 minutes remaining. Knowing that the CPU was only used to 50%, I decided to watch the latest Channel Frederator in iTunes while the render completed. I turned iTunes to full screen mode to watch Frederator. After about ten minutes of this, I got a freaking KERNEL PANIC! I got weird text dumped at the top of the screen, and a sound sample from the Frederator I was watching was repeating over and over out of the speakers. Unfortunately I didn't think to write down the weird text.
So here (at last) are my questions:
1. Why is PowerMac only using 50% of its CPU during renders? (Bear in mind, AE isn't GPU-enabled to my knowledge. So its renders are all CPU.) My only guess is, that the renders are memory or disk constrained. Adobe does recommend that I get a second hard drive for AE to store its temporary working files, so that AE and the OS X swap space aren't competing with each other. Does this make sense to anyone else? Also, I have 1.5 gig memory, is that too little?
2. What is up with these crashes? This is like Windows XP land. Again, what sold me on the all-Mac graphics setup was the stability of the Mac mini.
2.a. Are there hardware diagnostics or software tests built-in to OS X that I can run to troubleshoot?
2.b. While setting up PowerMac, I copied system settings (and everything else) from Mac mini. I'm worried that there's a configuration file somewhere that's confusing PowerMac into thinking it's secretly a Mac mini or something. Of course, when I say that out loud, it sounds completely silly.
Thanks in advance,
-Paul
Quad G5 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

1. Only certain filters and effects in AE are well multithreaded and can take advantage of the four cores. I use AE a lot as well, and I can tell you this is normal. What you want to consider is buying the Nucleo plug-in from Gridiron Software at http://www.gridironxfactor.com/products/nucleo_overview.asp
This plug-in will allow AE to fully utilize all four cores on almost anything you're working on, except for effects that are temporally dependent, such as Particle Playground. You need to be using AE 6.5 or 7 to use Nucleo. I bought it and it's one of the best things I could've done. However, your 1.5 GB of RAM is rather small for using AE on a Quad. I'd consider bumping the RAM up to 4 - 4.5GB or so. If you AE 7, it can utilize 3 GB of RAM (previous versions were limited to 2GB).
2. I bet you got the beachball when you returned from sleep because the camera had also gone to sleep and didn't wake up. I imagine that if you'd turned the camera off after waking up from sleep (or power cycled the camera - turn it off and then right back on) the beachball wouldn't have occured or would have gone away. I'm pretty sure I've had this happen to me on my Quad and PowerBook, and this always solved it. Not sure as to the reasons for the KP you got when using iTunes... sorry.
2a. Your machine would have come with the Apple Hardware Test which can be used to test the hardware of your machine. It's on the restore disc that came with the computer. You'l need to boot from the CD while holding down the option key. This will present you with a list of boot options, one of which will be the AHT. For testing memory, I'd recommend using Memtest which you can get a http://www.memtestosx.com For best results, you need to start in single-user mode so that it can test as much RAM as possible.
2b. I did a clean install of all my applications and whatnot on my Quad to avoid a problem like this... It's very time consuming, though. If you're concerned about this, you could delete all the preferences files from the computer and reboot, but you'll then have to reset your prefs in all your apps, and may have reenter some serial numbers as well. In any event, I wouldn't try this unless you start to have frequent issues. My Quad has KP'd once (while using Toast, I believe), but hasn't done so since. My PowerBook has never had a kernel panic.

Particle playground problem

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