I'm new to Combustion 4 and trying to use one of the fire particles to create a campfire. The background footage is a light colored sand onto which I have placed the fire particles. I'm now adjusting the colors of the particles but the color in the particle preview window (black background) looks like what I want but the particles on top of the lighter source footage does not look as good. I know I must be missing something simple with changing the particles color.
Re: Fire by Serious Lee on Jul 31, 2007 at 1:44:59 pm
Select the particle system in your workspace and under that select the emitter you want to change. YOu are changing the settings of a library entry and not the particles you have placed in your scene..
Let us know how long you get to work before Combustion starts crashing repeatedly.
Re: Fire by DavePotts on Jul 31, 2007 at 1:54:48 pm
If you click the arrow above your particle preview window, you can select color and change the background color of the preview window to white or gray. This may help you tweak the saturation of your colors a bit for compositing over a lighter color like sand. Also, I'd play around with the blend mode of your particle layer. Depending on the effect you're going for and what the surrounding scene looks like, you might try hard light or overlay.
Dave Potts
Broadcast Communications
University of North Carolina @ Charlotte
This is really easy to fix. If you put the particles on a separate layer within your composition, you will get the correct transfer mode between particles [fire effects use an additive mode to make them look bright] but they will composite properly over any background.
A more complicated and slower fix would be to duplicate the Particles system, then turn off "Intense" on the "Particles" page for each individual particle in the system. That way you have one system that doesn't get "Added" over the background and the top one which will look right. You may get some dark outlines this way which is why the two layer method is usually much better.
You could also use a holdout matte but unless you have a plugin for it, it can be very messy.
