Okke Verbart wrote:Whilst there's certainly room for improvement and it can definitely benefit from lots of improvements, I wouldn't classify the whole thing as junky. It depends really on what you'd want to accomplish.
If you're looking for totally realistic fireworks, then it may be very hard to accomplish in Fusion and stock footage or something like Houdini would fit the bill better. If however, it's more stylistic, Fusion could fit the bill quite well.
No, I'd say its pretty junky. It's like eyeon gave the whole pEmitter "project" to an intern back in the day and they said meh, good enough 20 years ago but never updated it since.
2D particles cant be sent to an image plane for use in 3D scenes without first being flattened through a merge node/ background combo and then sent to an image plane for use in the 3d scene. Which is just odd and you maybe thinking, but why would you do this anyways? Well to use all of the particle options that only apply to 2D particles like Blur, Glow, blend modes (through the image plane/ software render options), and then what should be simple 2.5D settings to fake more depth in the 2D particles just dont work great... or maybe they only apply to the particles in 3d mode but who knows because options that may only effect 3D particles arent labeled as such the way the 2D options are.
The 3D particle on the other hand can be simply simply applied to a 3D scene (or even 2d with a simple camera node), however! once you do this you lose 9/10ths the options you'd want to composite a particle effect well; like Blur, Glow, and BLEND modes. So the work around to this problem is to actually build your entire 3d Scene with all object and assets in it so; you have like a BG image plane to camera, and then a green screen actor, and some other objects at various depths in the scene. And now you want to add rain with a soft light blend... well to bad, no blend modes. So now replace all of your assets with Black background nodes or materials, this way you can have the particles still going behind those objects and then after your camera render apply a channel Boolens node so you can use one of the color channels to extract the alpha and then use a 2d merge node to get your softlight blend mode applied back over another whole instance of your scene where you have the original materials still...
Like that's got to be a joke... But, it still gets worse, just wait until you try to work with particles, 2D or 3D, with 2d or 3d track, spline, or animation paths and data. This adds a whole other layer of strange behaviors and crap not working as you'd think it should when rigging out a scene.
Oh and dont even get me started on the fact that the pRender node doesnt have any options to increase its DOD and that the, "kill particles outside the view" option has nothing to do with pRenders DOD...