Are you going to post the video of the fish swimming? I'm hoping so. Out of all of your work that I've seen, that's my favorite. (And that's saying a lot as I really like your work)

Will do, Chris... I'll go compress a version for here. Thanks for liking what I lovingly refer to as my "Salmon Porn". Check back soon.

~vi

Hi Chris, I finally was able to upload the fish clip. Was having technical problems getting the site to compress it. Happy fishing!

~vi

You are a great artist, Victor. I follow your work and experimentation for years. Very nice to meet you here.

Thank you Charis. Your work adds a great new dimension to this forum. I'm looking forward to seeing more! ~vi

Hello Victor,
I really admire you're work and was wondering if you could provide some insight into your World Trade Center video on your site. I imagine it was done with time particles but I can't quite get mine to behave the way I want to. I've read your responses in other forums of how your animations require very careful tweaking and maybe that's what I'm getting wrong but I would really appreciate a helpful hint.

Thanks

Thank you Victor.

I wasn't letting my particles live long enough (only 10) and that fixed IO is a great idea (I always seem to forget about it).

I was using Path Angle: Lum, I actually reduced the source with image operations to provide black and white interestingly shaped paths I wanted the particles to follow.

I'll keep at it when I get a chance and thank you for your help.

i'm gla di could help. but since I mistakenly posted my reponse on your comments page... i've reposted it here for others to see:

At 7:46am on August 13th, 2007, Victor Ingrassia said…
You are right about the "tweak" issues. Because with the time dependent nature of Time Particles you can have the same settings work on one video clip and fail on another. For instance with the WTC clip I have the particles following paths of luminance. So light areas in the source image steer the particles in one direction, dark areas in the other. This makes things very sensitive to the brightness and contrast of your source.

For your purposes, I'm guessing that most important settings contributing to the World Trade center piece are:

That the particles follow lines of luminance:
TP2>Path Angle: Lum

That the particles only live for a while:
TP1> Fixed Time=60 (I'm guessing here... I don't have the original paseq anymore)

And that I do not erase the canvas, but fade the canvas to black to increase continuity:
Image Operation> Fixed Color >Black >Mix:(approx)15%
This causes the particles which have been painted on the canvas to fade to black over time... in effect a 15% black eraser which slowly removes what's old on the canvas. This is a classic approach; leaving trails, creating some continuity from frame to frame and adding to an overall sense of smoothness.

Other than that, play with the number of paths, the size of the brush, the spacing of the particles... and do your development and tests on the very clip you intend to use...because too many things change from video to video. Keep "exporting as" all your test paseq's so you have all your incarnations in case you need em. And when you have something you like, use that paseq as your starting point to tweak for other source video. There's a good chance you'll go through 10-20 different versions before you find the one that works just right for you.

hope this helps,
victor

i like the dogs!

It's those happy accidents that are frustrating and leave one with wishing they could be duplicated, but often cannot be! Nice stuff!

Hey Victor!

Thanks for the support! Its sinking in a little more each day that he's going to be taking the oath in January. Pretty good feeling.

As intense and amazing as the campaign was, I'm looking forward to taking time over the next couple months and delving back into SA. Have some footage that I haven't had much opportunity to play with that I think will be very interesting.

Hey, Victor! It's been a long time.

I'm a day late and a bazillion dollars short but happy birthday Victor!