Hey everyone, quick question. I was in the process of planning out making a relatively complicated particle effect, but I am unsure how to proceed. I am going to be having a fairly intricate ground effect as part of it, but there are three ways I could do this that I know of but I would like to know what the pro’s and con’s of the ways are.
I am going to be making the effect in After Effects, but I could either:
Render out the effect as a video, use the new Media Framework to turn it into a video texture and use that in the particle system (there would only be 1-3 particles using the texture in this method). This method would yield the best looking results, I imagine.
Render out the effect as a flipbook. This would either result in a severely decreased quality result due to having to shrink it down to fit multiple frames on a texture. OR I would have to use a huge texture and still have a relative loss in quality.
Or, I render out a single part of a single frame, use that as a static texture, and then have a whole mess of nodes in the material to try and fake the correct movement, as well as having to spawn a bunch of this particle to mimic the effect I want.
Really, I know that I want to use a video file, but I am wondering what problems I am going to face if I try to do so. Will the effect be too big of a draw on processing power? Will the video file be too intensive of a resource to draw up quickly? Is a single particle with movie texture less of a drain than many particles with flipbooks? Am I worrying to much? All the important questions.
Any help would be appreciated!