User Manual

Common Controls
Conditions, Style, Region, and Settings Tabs
The Conditions, Style, Region, and Settings tabs are common to all Particle nodes, so their
descriptions can be found in “The Common Controls” section at the end of this chapter.
The Common Controls
Particle nodes share a number of identical controls in the inspector. This section describes the
Style, Conditions, Region, and Settings tabs that are common among particle nodes.
Inspector
Style Tab
The Style Tab is common to the pEmitter, pSpawn, pChangeStyle, and pImage Emitter. It
controls the appearance of the particles using general controls like type, size, and color..
Style
The Style menu provides access to the various types of particles supported by the Particle
Suite. Each style has its specific controls, as well as controls it will share with other styles.
 Point: This option produces particles precisely one pixel in size. Controls that are
specific to Point Style are Apply Mode and Sub Pixel Rendered.
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Apply Mode: This menu applies only to 2D particles. 3D particle systems are not
affected.It includes Apply modes for Add and Merge. Add combines overlapping
particles by adding together the color values of each particle. Merge uses a simple
over operation to combine overlapping particles.
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Sub Pixel Rendered: This checkbox determines whether the point particles are
rendered with Sub Pixel precision, which provides smoother-looking motion but
blurrier particles that take slightly longer to render.
 Bitmap: This style produces particle cells based on an image file or another node in
the Node editor. When this option is selected an orange image input appears on the
node in the node editor. There are several controls for affecting the appearance and
animation. In addition to the controls in the Style section, a Merge section is displayed
at the bottom of the inspector when Bitmap is selected as the Style. The Merge section
includes controls for additive or subtractive merges when the particle cells overlap.
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Animate Over Time: This menu includes three options for determining how movie
files play when they are used as particle cell bitmaps. The Over Time setting plays
the movie file sequentially. For instance, when the comps is on frame 2, frame 2 of
the movie file is displayed, when the comp is on frame 3, frame 3 of the movie files
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