Boris FX Particle Illusion 2021 Tutorial

April 13, 2021
, After Effects, Film Making

There are quite a number of tools available to create cool looking particle effects. There’s the inbuilt CC Particle World effect in After Effects. There’s Trapcode Particular from Red Giant. And then there’s Particle Illusion from Boris FX. I have talked about it before in my beginner tutorial for how to use Particle Illusion.

While the plugin version of Particle Illusion costs money, the standalone version is completely free. And it has most of the features of the paid version!
The only features you do not get with the standalone application are:

Run as an effect within your host application. Supports After Effects, Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas, Media Composer and more.
Compositing your particles directly onto the footage. For that, Particle Illusion needs to run within a host application.
Integrated Mocha Tracker. This allows you to track moving objects and have emitters follow their movement.
Integrated masking using Mocha and the PixelChooser. This allows you to control where your particles are visible.
Reading Particle Colour and Alpha from the underlying video source. This can be useful to do things like disintegration effects.
Audio Driven Particles using the Beat Reactor. This allows you to have particles react to music or sound.
Integrated Particle Glow. You can achieve this with separate Glow effects, but having this inbuilt can make things a bit easier.
Email & Phone Technical Support.

However, despite the above limitations, the FREE standalone version is a fantastic tool to create great looking particle effects.
In this tutorial I will show you how to get it and how to use it.

Click here to get Particle Illusion Standalone For FREE!

The recent 2021 release also adds the following features that I will be showing in the video:

New particle emitters
New turbulence to affect particle position and size
New lines features to connect particles and create funky motion graphics effects
3D particles, cameras and views. Particle Illusion now supports a full 3D scene for your particle effects!

If you are considering getting the Premium filter for Particle Illusion, be sure to use my code surfacedstudio at checkout to get 15% OFF the final price!

Time Stamps