Free Stuff!!!

[Nikosony]

Thanks for telling us how a particular piece of software worked, I haven't gotten round to trying them all (maybe one day). Glad to hear it helped you out in your work presentation, I think the quality of freeware and open source has improved considerably over the past few years. I spotted this on my way here tonight, it isn't freeware but for $149.99 it's looks like a cheap ticket into the world of special effects, chromakeying and colour grading. It's called CompositeLab Pro, first time I've heard of it and it can be found at:

CompositeLab Pro - FXhome + 10' x 6' Green Screen

CompositeLab Pro 'professional grading and compositing for digital video'

You also get a 10 ft by 6 ft greenscreen thrown in with it.

$149.99

Watch the short demo video aswell to see what it can do.

I should point out I have no affiliation to any of the products or companies in this thread.

[Nikosony]

Freeware basic particle generator...

I recently downloaded a small program called Explogenv2 that allows you to create explosions for games, while looking at it and messing around with the settings I saw some potential for creating basic particle effects. It has 3 inbuilt emitters but I just used number 1 and created a series of still images to create an animation. You can find it at: http://www.kenginegaming.com/explogen2page.php

It will create your file but you will need another small app called Img2Avi, where you can import a set of bitmap images and it will convert them to a .avi file that can then be opened in all the popular editors. It can be found at: Img2Avi Jpg2Avi Bmp2Avi Gif2Avi

Unfortunately the .avi files created don't have an alpha channel but I just used Luma Keying to get rid of the black background.

If you decide to download Explogenv2, try these settings to create a particle effect:

Explosion 1 (on) Explosions 2 and 3 set to off

Speed 1

Amount 400

Life 30

Particles

Speed 4

Amount 40

Life 30

Type Fuzzy

Start Colour Purple R=128 G=128 B=255
End Colour Light Grey R=192 G=192 B=192