I'm making my own movie...
 

Anyone know of any real good special effects programs (or particle effects programs)?

I have a real fast computer, but it's a PC, so no Mac recommendations!

Thanks!

Adobe After Effects is fairly decent. I've started using that and it seems to be able to give me some fairly decent effects work. There's prolly some better stuff out there, but if you're familiar with the Adobe suite (Photoshop, Premier, so on) this would be a good addition to have.

I do piece together with Premiere but haven't tried After Effects. I will.

Any other programs with good particle or CGI effects?

3 possibilities. 1. Maya. 2. Maya. 3. Maya.

www.aliaswavefront.com

BTW, moderator, you should move this to the computer forum.

I downloaded Maya, I just have to learn how to use it.

Now THAT is the hard part. :-)

You can get PDF versions of manuals for the program on Kazaa (or maybe even downloadable at aliaswavefront itself). There are also many books on Maya, some excellent. Search Amazon.com or half.com. A good one to start with is Maya 4.5 Fundamentals. Another good one for learning tricks from is
Exploring Maya 4 : 30 Studies in 3D. Also, visit www.renderosity.com and www.highend3d.com.

Thank you - you've been a HUGE help!

Do you do editing yourself?

I'm still in the process of learning the program myself-- but I know enough about it to know that you can do almost anything that you would want to do with it, if you learn the tricks. Including the particle effects you mentioned, and physics, and dynamics...

I would say that a majority of all movies, TV shows, and commercials that you see with computer FX have been done at least partially with Maya. Those Blockbuster commercials with the Guniea pig and rabbit? Maya. The movie Final Fantasy? Maya. (Maya, unfortunately, couldn't generate a decent story for that one). Pod racers in Episode 1? Maya. The list goes on and on, but I think that I won't.

Ever thought of school? Granted they don't teach ILM-related FX, but...

Nah, school takes too long. I'd rather be self-taught. School tends to go too slow for me - you know, the ADD type.

What kind of effects are you talking about? Many effects can be done the old fashion way and look much better than a lot of computer programs.

Commotion is a popular FX software for low-budget movies, however I don't know if they make a PC version.

The problem is that all of your good editing programs are Mac, with the exception of Avid DVXpress, which is PC/Mac. Because of this, most of the major FX programs want to be Mac, so users don't have to cross platforms.

Try your best to do work around any effects, unless you have to do green-screening or something. 99% of all video effects look hopelessly cheesy, unless done on Maya.

- Mike