The Style tab provides controls that affect the appearance of the particles, allowing the look and feel of the particles to be determined and animated over time.

The Style Menu control provides access to the various types of particles supported by the Particle Suite. Each style has its own specific controls, as well as controls it will share with other styles.

This option produces particles exactly one pixel in size. Controls that are specific to Point Style are Apply Mode and Sub Pixel Rendered.

Both the Bitmap and Brush Styles produce particles based on an image file. The Bitmap Style relies on the image from another tool in the Flow and the Brush Style uses image files in the brushes directory. They both have numerous controls for affecting their appearance and animation, described below.

This option produces large, soft spherical particles, with controls for Color, Size, Fade timing, Merge method and Noise.

This style produces particles composed of bottle caps from the Coopers brand of beer (the best beer in Australia, and quite possibly the world. To dispute our choice please send samples of the superior brew to eyeon Software, c\o the Product Manager).

This style produces straight line-type particles with optional 'falloff'. The Size To Velocity control described below (under Size Controls) is often useful with this Line type. The Fade control adjusts the amount of falloff over the length of the line.

This style produces small clusters of single pixel particles. Point Clusters are similar to the Point style, however they are more efficient when a large quantity of particles is required. This style shares controls with the Point style. Additional controls specific to Point Cluster style are Number of Points and Number Variance.

This standard Color Control selects the color and alpha values of the particles generated by the emitter.

These range controls provide a means of expanding the colors produced by the pEmitter. Setting the Red variance range at -0.2 to +0.2 will produce colors that vary 20% on either side of the red channel, for a total variance of 40%. If the pEmitter is set to produce R0.5, G0.5, B0.5 (pure grey), the variance shown above will produce points with a color range between R0.3, G0.5, B0.5 and R0.7, G0.5, B0.5.

To visualize color space as values between 0-256 or as 0-65535, change the values used by Fusion using the Show Color As option provided in the General tab within the Preferences dialog.

This checkbox locks the color variance of the particles. Unlocking this allows the color variance to be applied differently to each color channel, giving rise to a wider range of colors.

This standard gradient control allows for the selection of a range of color values to which the particle will adhere over its lifetime.

The left point of the gradient represents the particle color at birth. The right point shows the color of the particle at the end of its lifespan.

Additional points can be added to the gradient control to cause the particle color to shift throughout its life.

This type of control can be extremely useful for fire-type effects (for example, the flame may start out blue, turn orange and end a darker red). The gradient itself can be animated over time by right-clicking on the control and selecting Animate from the context menu. All points on the gradient will be controlled by a single Color Over Life spline, which controls the speed at which the gradient itself changes. You may also use the From Image modifier, which produces a gradient from the range of colors in an image along a line between two points.

The majority of the Size Controls are self-explanatory. The Size and Size Variance controls are used to determine the size and degree of size variation for each particle. It is worth noting that the Point style does not have size controls (each point is a single pixel in size and there is no additional control).

When a Bitmap Particle style is used, a value of 1.0 indicates that each particle should be exactly the same size as the input bitmap. A value of 2.0 will scale the particle up in size by 200%. For the best quality particles, always try to make the input bitmap as big, or bigger, than the largest particle produced by the system.

For the Point Cluster style, the size control adjusts the density of the cluster, or how close together each particle will get.

There are additional size controls that can be used to further adjust the size of particles based on velocity and depth.

This increases the size of each particle relative to the Velocity or speed of the particle. The velocity of the particle is added to the size, scaled by the value of this control.

1.0 on this control, such as for a particle travelling at 0.1, will add another 0.1 to the size (velocity * sizetovelocity + size = newsize). This is most useful for Line styles, but the control can be used to adjust the size of any style.

This control measures the degree to which the size of each particle is increased or decreased according to its depth (position in Z space). The effect is to exaggerate or reduce the impact of perspective. The default value is 1.0, which provides a relatively realistic perspective effect.

Objects on the focal plane (Z = 0.0) will be actual-sized. Objects farther along Z will become smaller. Objects closer along Z will get larger.

A value of 2.0 will exaggerate the effect dramatically, whereas a value of 0.0 will cancel the effects of perspective entirely.

This LUT spline control determines the size of a particle throughout its lifespan. The vertical scale represents a percentage of the value defined by the Size control, from 0 to 200%. The horizontal scale represents a percentage of the particle's lifespan (0 to 100%).

This graph supports all of the features available to a standard [[../../../LUT_Editor|LUT editor]]. These features can be accessed by right-clicking on the graph. It is also possible to view and edit the graph spline in the larger [[../../../SplineEditor#LUTs|Spline view]].

This simple range slider provides a mechanism for fading a particle at the start and end of its lifetime. Increasing the Fade In value will cause the particle to fade in at the start of its life. Decreasing the Fade Out value will cause the particle to fade out at the end of its life.

This control's values represent a percentage of the particle's overall life, therefore, setting the Fade In to 0.1 would cause the particle to fade in over the first 10% of its total lifespan. For example, a particle with a life of 100 frames would fade in from frame 0..10.

This set of particle controls affects the way individual particles are merged together. The Subtractive/Additive slider works exactly as documented in the standard Merge tool. The Burn-In control will cause the particles to overexpose, or `blow out', when they are combined together.

None of the Merge controls will have any effect on a 3D particle system.

This set of particle controls can be used to apply a Blur to the individual particles. Blurring can be applied globally, by age, or by Z depth position.

None of the Blur controls will have any effect on a 3D particle system.

These controls apply Blur to each particle. Unlike the Blur in the pRender tool, this is applied to each particle independently before the particles are merged together. The Blur Variance slider modifies the amount of blur applied to each particle.

This spline graph controls the amount of Blur that is applied to the particle over its life. The vertical scale represents a percentage of the value defined by the Blur control. The horizontal scale represents a percentage of the particle's lifespan.

This graph supports all of the features available to a standard [[../../../LUT_Editor|LUT editor]]. These features can be accessed by right-clicking on the graph. It is also possible to view and edit the graph spline in the larger [[../../../SplineEditor#LUTs|Spline view]].

This slider control applies blur to each particle based on its position along the Z axis.

The DoF Focus range control is used to determine what area of the image remains in focus. Lower values along Z are closer to the camera. Higher values are farther away. Particles within the range will remain in focus. Particles outside that range will have the blur defined by the Z Blur control applied to them.

This control only applies to 2D particles. 3D particle systems are not affected.

Overlapping particles are combined by adding the color values of each particle together.

Overlapping particles are merged together.

(Bitmap Style Only) This control appears when the Bitmap style is selected, along with an orange Style Bitmap input on the tool's icon in the Flow view. Connect a 2D tool to this input to provide images to be used for the particles. You can do this on the Flow view, or you may drag and drop the image source tool onto the Style Bitmap control from the Flow or Timeline, or right-click on the control and select the desired source from the Connect To menu.

(Brush Style Only)This drop-down list shows the names of any image files stored in the Brushes directory. The location of the Brushes directory is defined in the [[../../../Preferences|Preferences]] dialog, under [[../../../Preferences/PrefsPathMap|Path Maps]]. The default is the Brushes subdirectory within Fusion's install folder. If no images are in this directory, the only option in the menu will be None, and no particles will be rendered.

(Bitmap Style Only) This list determines how the animation of the bitmap source is applied to newly-created particles. It can be hard to visualize the impact of this control until it has been experimented with. A good way to experiment is to load the flow in the Fusion>Examples directory called pTextParticleAge.comp and try out the three settings. View the Text tool in the display view and the pRender tool another view, then step through the frames using the [ and ] keys.

All particles use the image produced by the Style Bitmap tool at the current time, and change to each successive image together in step, as time increases. A particle created at frame 1 will contain the image at frame 1 of the Style Bitmap. At frame 2, the original particle will use the image from frame 2, and so will any new particles. All created particles will share exactly the same bitmap image from their source at all times.

Each particle animates through the sequence of images provided by the Style Bitmap tool, independently of other particles. In other words, an individual particle's appearance is taken from the Style Bitmap tool at successive times, indexed by its age.

New particles take the image from the Style Bitmap tool at the current time and keep it unchanged until the end of the particle's lifespan. Thus, particles generated on a given frame will all have the same appearance, and will stay that way.

(Bitmap Style Only) This control allows the bitmap source frame to be Offset in time from the current frame.

(Bitmap Style Only) This control can be used to scale the time range of the source bitmap images by a specified amount. For example, a scale of 2 will cause the particle created at frame 1 to be read from the bitmap source at frame 2.

(Bitmap and Brush Style Only) This control is used to apply a correction to the overall Gain of the image that is used as the bitmap. Higher values produce a brighter image, whereas lower values reduce both the brightness and the transparency of the image.

(Blob Style Only) Increasing this control's value will introduce grain-type noise to the blobby particle.

(Line Style Only) The Fade control adjusts the falloff over the line particle's length. The default value of 1.0 causes the line to fade out completely by the end of the length.

(Point and Point Cluster Style Only) This checkbox determines if the point particles are rendered with Sub Pixel precision, which provides smoother looking motion but blurrier particles that take slightly longer to render.

(Point Cluster Style Only) The value of this control determines how many points are in each Point Cluster.