Particle Payground slows to a snails pace and cooks my PC

[MMisterMM]

Hi

I am squeezing the last life I can out of AE CS6, and still produce a lot of work with it.

However, I am trying to use Particle Playground to add smoke to a chimney in a composition. The effect looks great with a bit of fast blur. As soon as I begin rendering the comp, it flies and renders pretty much in real time for the first 15 seconds then starts to slow down and withing aanother 10 seconds or so it is rendering at about 1 frame every 10 seconds and slows even further until it's barely moving, cooking my CPU all the while (keeping my studio nice and warm).

I have a fairly rcent Asus motherboard wih an i9 and 64GB or ram and a tons of disk space on Win 10 Pro, so I doubt it's a system issue

When the comp is rendering, I can see in Task Manager my memory slowley filling up.

I've tried reducing the particles to just 30, with the same result. Do the particles never die as they do in CC Particle World? I can't see a longevity setting or similar.

Am I missing something, or am I flogging this CS6 dead horse?

Many thanks. Mr M.

[Mylenium]

Yepp, exactly. Unless you create property maps to actually kill particles/ set a lifespan they evaluate forever and never die. This is how the effect is designed and not a limitation of CS6 or any of that.

Mylenium 

[MMisterMM]

Thanks Mylenium

I can't find any reference to property maps, not even in this forum. Are you able to point me to soemthing that will help me figure that out?

thanks again

[MMisterMM]

Found a few nuggets of info online after a while. Tried playing with the Persistent Property Mapper, which I believe should kill particles when Lifespan is selected. Only, when I select my shape layer in "Use Layer As Map", it disspaears. Adjusting the lifespan settings doesn't brink it bak, unless I set the "Use Layer As Map" back to none. Very confusing.

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

Pre-compose the shape layer and tweak the "Affects" setting so the properties are assigned at birth and not continually re-assigend and evaluated. You would technically require only a single pixel at the emitter, but for sake of simplicity create a small circle around it.

Mylenium

[MMisterMM]

That worked perfectly. Thank you Mylenium, you've saved me a huge headache. I'll be able to re-use this agian and again now.  🙂

All the best.