Genarts Aquisition of Wondertouch & ParticleIllusion!

I am just sitting here enjoying my morning 16 oz home brewed mocha when I see @ninjacrayon (Ko Maruyama) tweet that Wondertouch has just been acquired by GenArts, the creators of the Sapphire plugins!  First thought… “well I am happy for Alan Lorence”, second thought… “crap, is the price going to go up now?”  Well, upon further investigation, no it won’t be and it seems as though Wondertouch and its babies, particleIllusion and particleIllusionAE are in very good hands and are set on a December release date this year.

So what does this actually mean?  Well instead of the tiny company that Wondertouch is… made up of Alan Lorence, the founder of Wondertouch, and a few other people, the fate of particleIllusion and particleIllusionAE (I’m going to refer to these as pI and pIAE from now on) are in very good hands, and are hopefully going to gain much more steam and reach a wider variety of platforms in the coming years.

If you haven’t heard of pI before, it is a standalone application for creating amazingly intricate particle systems using custom emitters that you can build yourself, or choose from the thousands in the existing pI library.  Over the years, Alan Lorence has created emitters that resemble realistic fire, smoke, liquid, utilizing 3d objects, and a vast amount of other fantastic looking emitters.  The best thing about this product, is every month there is a new emitter library released, resulting in over 2600 emitters total over the life of the product!  Up until this coming December the only product available has been pI 3.0 which is a fantastic product, and you have probably seen its emitters in quite a few movies and TV shows.  Now, in December with Genarts heading the company and Alan on as a full-time developer, they are full scale ready for the release of pIAE which is about 3 years in the making, and is going to be well worth the wait.

Whats the benefit of GenArts owning Wondertouch… at least for us?  Well, GenArts is proven to be an amazing company, with their plugin packages such as Sapphire available for platforms such as Adobe, Apple, Avid, Autodesk, Assimilate, Eyeon, FilmLight, The Foundry, Quantel and SGO, we can only hope that pI will make it’s way to those platforms as well.  Not only the possibility of having pI available on a wider range of platforms, but now there is a team like GenArts backing the product (this is guesswork, because I don’t know what the development structure looks like), but we can expect there to be a ton of support, tutorials, even more emitter libraries, and perhaps training in the future.  Whenever a company buys another smaller company, there seems to be some revamping happening, and it is never a bad thing for change that moves a product forward.

As for pIAE, it’s scheduled release for December 2009 is still on track, and will be available for After Effects only, and will not yet work with other Adobe programs utilizing the AEX plugins extensions like Premiere… YET.  The product is going to be $299, but only $179 if you already have a copy of pI 3.0 standalone.  The only bad thing about pIAE 1.0 is it “won’t give you access to the “lower level” parameters like particle color gradients, size over life graphs, particle images, particle image reference point location, initial particle angle — the things that are in the various pages of the emitter properties dialog in pI3. Forces and deflectors will not be present in version 1.0. Also, because of the number of parameters that each emitter adds, there may be some limit to the number of emitters that you can add to a project.”  (taken from Wondertouch’s website).  With the acquirement like I said, is we are hoping to see an updated version soon after the release, as well as emitter libraries geared towards us that want to work solely in After Effects.

All in all, the acquirement is a big deal, and a huge step in the right direction for Wondertouch and Alan Lorence’s products as a whole.  If you want to brush up on how to use pI 3.0 you can check out a few training DVDs that are out there, Elvis Deane’s two titles (a little older, but still pertain to 3.0) The Apprentice Magician’s Guide to pI 3.0 & Cooking With pI – Video Recipes for Pixel Pyrotechnics.  You can also check out the Press Release on Wondertouch’s Website, the official information page for pIAE, and the conference call below with GenArts CEO Katherine Hays and Wondertouch CEO Alan Lorence.