How to create animated mask emitter

Hello all!

I was intrigued by the clip shown in the sneak peek video for pi 3.0 where you see the figure of a man rendered as fire, smoke, etc. I understand that this is created by using a masked emitter... I am unclear however, on what file format is the best to use for this... I have photoshop 7 (and I just downloaded the patch for pi 3.0 so I can use psd files), can I use this to create an animated image and import it into PI?

What I want to do is create a human figure mask to which I will attach an emitter (for example, create a demon with fire and smoke emitters which I will render in pI and overlay in vegas 4.0) Or is there some other software package that you would suggest would work better for this (to create the initial image...)

Thanks in advance for the help...

Bryan Steagall

Elvis:

Thanks for the advice, I downloaded blender (mentioned somewhere back in another post) do you think that would work better?

Bryan

Elvis:

Thanks for the help. I eventually purchased Poser 5 so I can do what I needed and works great! You can animate and then export from poser to a series of PNG files which then particle illusion would pick up as a sequence.

Now I'm just playing around to see if I can create a "balrog" style creature that looks halfway decent, by combining several layers of this animation with different emitters (such as fire and smoke)

By the way, I was looking at some of your short movies... pretty impressive!

later
Bryan