Particles animation with transparent background

Hi there,

I can not find anywhere the solution how to render image or animation of particles with transparent background.
Is there a way to do so?

Thanks.

L

You can set a transparent background under Render Settings > Film > Check Transparent.
But keep in mind that not every format supports an alpha channel. So you might be better of rendering a .png or a .exr image sequence.

Hope that helps.

Make sure your PNG format is RBGA not just RGB, the ‘A’ for alpha is the key thing.

Thanks, but that’s what I’ve tried. When I render with .png RGBA with the transparent option checked I can see only few particles not all of them.First image is as it should look like and second is with Transparent background.



That’s pretty normal, if you have a transparent background, they have nothing to stand out against. Pull the image sequence into Blender and composite it and you’ll get what you’re after.
If you look at the front bit of this video:

…You can see lots of foreground and background particles, these are composited from image sequences, below is what my actual output was, followed by a still from the composite and the node tree I used for the particles. I haven’t included the full composite node tree as it covers many layers, but basically, you use an Alpha Over to put your particles into the composite.

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Thanks colkai. I thought if I’ll export the blender image as .png I’ll be able to use it in other software as photoshop etc.

You can, but always with something behind it, you can produce a similar blur effect in photoshop using gaussian blur and play about with opacity and layer blend modes to afffect the particle layer. The result from the above composite could easily be reproduced in Photoshop. It’s just in Blender, with an animation, it’s easier as you’re dealing with multiple image sequences. I have only a very basic undersnating of photoshop, (in my case Serif Photoplus, but it’s very similar).

I’m only a beginner. I also wanted to use something like snow effect for my video. I’m using old Pinnacle studio. It’s shame it is impossible to export animation with a transparent background.

You should be able to pull an image sequence into your video editor as a movie. That said, Blender is great for this sort of thing. That tutorial I linked to above is ALL blender apart from the initial green screen of the actress. Removela of markers, greenscreen and compositing is all done within Blender.

You’re right but it is a bit more work to do. It would be easier to export animation of particles without background and put the animation on the top of other video footage in any video software.

Should behave exactly the same as in Blender I would of thought. I did this in Serif Photoplus just now, using a couple of layers of transparent particles with glow on one of them and varying opacity. The blue background is a separate layer, as is the logo.

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