To make these bubbles float upward from one emitting point there are two main particle parameters to pay attention to. The first is the type of emitting shape. A Point, Sphere or Box can be chosen. This can be easily seen if you go to the View drop-down menu and turn on the Selection Indicator. A large emitting shape will make a lot of bubbles appear from many points within the shape, while a small shape will focus the bubbles to emit from a smaller source. Here, a Point shape was used to simulate air escaping from a rock crevice. The next critical control is Dragging Force. This will control what direction the bubbles will float towards. In this project a power of 5 was chosen on the “Y” axis as we would like the bubbles to float “up”. The number directly to the right of the axis value is how far the bubbles will spread out as they float up. Here, a value of 5 was chosen.
Finally, all three of these COOL 3D™ Production Studio objects were rendered out as AVI video files at 30 frames per second. And all three were 150 frames long (5 seconds).To get the background of these projects to be transparent, the data type option of 32bit was chosen. This generates an alpha-channel around the object so that only the object itself will be seen in the DVD Workshop menu, and not the rectangular project space in which it was created.
In DVD Workshop, the COOL 3D videos were imported to the Button library and then dragged into the workspace to be made ready for navigation links. The alpha-channel automatically keys in. In fact, shadows applied in DVD Workshop will play off the alpha channel to yield very slick results, as seen on the title text.
Hope these tips inspired you! Take your DVD menus to the next level and see what other impressive results you can achieve with video compositing in DVD Workshop using COOL 3D™ Production Studio and other alpha-channel image content.
