Blackmagic Forum

Dear Community,

I'm trying to create a particle system with multiple, randomly selected bitmaps. How can I achieve this?

And as a follow-up question: What I would actually like to to is to have a FastNoise-Node generating multiple images (as it's animated per default) generating multiple, random particles. Is that possible? I think in after effects you can randomly select frames out of a sequence of images (in this case my FastNoise) and feed it to the particle system.

Thanks for any help,
Remo

the pEmitter lets you choose between "particle age", "particle birth time" and "over time"
so if you have an animated source for the bitmap style "particle birth time" is the closest to random select one. but now every particle born on this frame will have the same bitmap.

but you can create several pEmitter with a different offset, pMerge them together and then modify/render them. so you get semi random styles for the particles

Create an image sequence of your different bitmaps, pipe that into a time stretcher. Put a Random modifier on the Time Stretcher's source time with the maximum being the number of frames in your image sequence. Pipe that into your particle emitter = random bitmap per particle.

Ryan Hays wrote:Create an image sequence of your different bitmaps, pipe that into a time stretcher. Put a Random modifier on the Time Stretcher's source time with the maximum being the number of frames in your image sequence. Pipe that into your particle emitter = random bitmap per particle.

Thanks, Ryan. Great answer that solved my problem. I used floor(rand(1,13) to select the random frame from the (0 to) 13 frame sequence. I also had to set the Emitter style to Bitmap and the Animate to "Particle Birth Time" to avoid the random bitmap selected on creating the particles changing during their lifetime.