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Form

Rendering Group

The Rendering group controls how particles appear when they render.

Render Mode

Defines what quality and features execute when Form renders a frame.

NOTE: To enable DOF, the Render Mode pop-up must be set to a DOF option AND the Comp Camera's DOF switch in the After Effects camera layer must be enabled.

• Motion Preview: This mode does a quick render of each particle as a point. This mode is useful for pre-visualization.
• Full Render: This is the default setting. The option generates a full-quality render but explicitly excludes depth of field.
• Full Render + DOF Square (AE): This is a full-quality render with depth of field. For custom particles, the DOF blur used is similar to After Effects' own DOF blur. This is a squarish look which, while faster, means less visual quality. DOF does not affect the Glow Sphere and Star particle types.
• Full Render + DOF Smooth: This is a full-quality render with depth of field. This option will increase rendering time. For custom particles, the DOF blur used is similar to a Gaussian blur and will produce better results than the After Effects DOF. DOF does not affect the Glow Sphere and Star particle types.

Acceleration

Form can take advantage of additional power in your graphics card (GPU) using GPU acceleration. In the Acceleration pop-up, you can select whether to use CPU (computer) or GPU (graphics card) acceleration. Accelerating with the CPU can sometimes be more reliable, but accelerating with the GPU usually speeds things up considerably.

GPU Particle Rendering

When using GPU acceleration, there are two options within the GPU Particle Rendering pop-up.

• Direct will render every particle. This will be more accurate, but speed increases might not be as significant.
• Streaming will usually provide a much stronger boost to particle render speeds, but this doesn’t render as accurately as Direct.

Note that Streaming will not render some features, such as Blend Modes. When Streaming is used and you apply unsupported features, a warning appears and Form uses Direct rendering.

Motion Blur Group: Motion Blur gives a smooth look to fast-moving particles, like a real world camera does. Learn more in the Motion Blur group.