User Manual

Table Of Contents
Style Tab
The Style tab exists in the pEmitter, pSpawn, pChangeStyle, and pImage Emitter. It controls the
appearance of the particles, allowing the look of the particles to be designed and animated
over time.
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 Style: This option produces particles precisely one pixel in size. Controls that are
specific to Point style are Apply Mode and Sub Pixel Rendered.
Bitmap Style and Brush Style: Both the Bitmap and Brush styles produce particles
based on an image file. The Bitmap style relies on the image from another node in the
node tree, and the Brush style uses image files in the Brushes directory. They both
have numerous controls for affecting their appearance and animation, described below.
Blob Style: This option produces large, soft spherical particles, with controls for Color,
Size, Fade timing, Merge method, and Noise.
Line Style: This style produces straight line-type particles with optional “falloff.” The
Size to Velocity control described below (under Size Controls) is often useful with this
Line type. The Fade control adjusts the amount of falloff over the length of the line.
Point Cluster Style: This style produces small clusters of single-pixel particles.
Point Clusters are similar to the Point style; however, they are more efficient when a
large quantity of particles is required. This style shares parameters with the Point style.
Additional controls specific to Point Cluster style are Number of Points and Number
Variance.
Style Options
The following options appear only on some of the styles, as indicated below.
Apply Mode (Point and Point Cluster)
This control applies only to 2D particles; 3D particle systems are not affected.
Add: Overlapping particles are combined by adding together the color values
of each particle.
Merge: Overlapping particles are merged.
Sub Pixel Rendered (Point and Point Cluster)
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.
Number of Points and Variance (Point Cluster)
The value of this control determines how many points are in each Point Cluster.
Animate (Bitmap Style)
If the Bitmap source is a movie file or image sequence, this menu determines which frame is
grabbed from the source and applied to newly-created particles.
Over Time: All particles use the image produced by the Style Bitmap node at the
current time, and change to each successive image together in step, as time increases.
A particle created at frame 1 will contain the image at frame 1 of the Style Bitmap.
At frame 2, the original particle will use the image from frame 2, and so will any new
particles. All created particles will share the same bitmap image from their source at all
times.
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