I tried to find a particle system plugin for Gimp. I know well that animation capabilities exist in Gimp, even with several different animation plugin sets which are quite serviceable for some purposes (I like Lightbox more than GAP, but that's not the point here...). However, I didn't find any usable plugins for particles. There's certainly functionality that could be used in G'MIC, because it can solve math and copy small bitmaps, but...

I CAN do particles with Blender, with physics system I can even use very advanced features. But sometimes I'd like just add some very basic 2D animation magic to a set of frames and Blender is a bit of overkill (although it IS fun).

It has happened so many times before that I have wished for functionality which *already exists* but which is not known to me. So, I try to be a little wiser and ask: is there particle plugin for Gimp?

I'm not sure if this will solve your problem, have you looked at the animation capabilities of MathMap? It's very easy to build things.

Argh. Installing Mathmap seems to be problematic. There seems to be instructions here (written by YAFU) in GimpChat. In my case is seems to be even more problematic, because I have some quite new libs installed... Ok, I try that a little later, when I have time to go through full compilation.

However, while Mathmap seems to be promising for many purposes, I'm willing to try other options too... I probably *could* write my own particle system in Python with Qt, but it *would* be more useful inside Gimp. Inside Gimp I'd need much more docs. (I tried scripting .scm scripts some years ago, that didn't work out, because I couldn't find documentation or it was deprecated/old.)

Sorry, thinking out, but I am somewhat surprised that there is no dedicated script/plugin for this... There are probably others who animate.

What do you mean by particles? Are they anything like the pixels in the Noise filter?

@Oregonian: Particles are any kind of objects you want to release in large numbers which then follow rules you define. Let's say you want to animate burst of stars coming from magic wand (in an image). You define that the tip of magic wand is emitter, you want, say, 100 stars to burst in, say, 50 frames of animation, and then they should fly towards the borders (in random directions) of the image and vanish. You see this every day in TV, but of course those animations are done very realistically... You can do things like explosions, fire, smoke, water and many other effects with particles.

(*begin thinking again*)

Oh no. I did the math.

Particle system, to be useful, needs layers, masks and quite probably physics for emitters and magnets. In the end it is very close being full-fledged graphics editor. Which means it is quite insane to begin to write a new one.

Back to Blender, I guess. Somehow it always ends with "hey I can already do this with Gimp/Blender/Inkscape". Thank god we have these FOSS stalwart apps!

Thanks for the explanation kimppi. Now I understand what you want. I have no useful suggestions though.

What distribution are you using? 32 or 64 bit?

@YAFU: 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with huge amount of extra libs due to all kind of tests and new toys, so I think I have to see if I can install old libs with them at all...

@K1TesseraEna: Particle Pro uses host editor, Blender plugin has Blender itself, but if I would write stand-alone Python app, it would need large functionality to make it useful. On the other hand, inside Gimp everything exists already, but the work would require knowledge of Gimp internals (i.e. API docs and quite a lot of experience of usage) which I don't have. I don't mean that it's impossible, but it is not very tempting, because work amount would be huge compared to using Blender, which has already the functionality. I already have OpenShot as video editor, it can composite Blender's particle output to my other animation frames just fine. But if somebody with madskillz in Gimp-fu wants to write particle plugin, even very basic one, I'll volunteer to test it...

@kimppi, download mathmap Fedora package and convert it to deb with alien (install alien first):
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buil ... dID=220694
Direct link for 32 bit:
http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//pack ... 5.i686.rpm


After that you should have a deb package in the same path.

This should work if you have GIMP installed from some repository or has installed it manually in /usr

To all who read this and have Ubuntu 64-bit, the steps would be the same by converting the package mathmap-1.3.5-2.fc15.x86_64.rpm with alien, installing the resulting deb package and then the next symbolic link:

So I hope that newbies have read the first "Odinbc" answer then
Odinbc proposed to kimppi try attempt to do something similar (workaround) with MathMap, maybe creating a new filter with the composer. Never said MathMap is a sort of particle system.

Oh. My. God.

With YAFU's alien trick I managed to install it.

I do not know what Matmap can do, but at least it is very clever piece of software! It very well might be capable of particles, too. At least I managed to animate a cellular automata with it (Conway's Game of Life)! That's very sophisticated algorithm which takes previous image to as input to processing the next.

@K1TesseraEna: If you need 2D particles and commercial is possible, I think something like ParticleIllusion is a possibility (Windooze, but works with Wine in Linux, expensive). But basically you're correct, Mathmap isn't actually particle system. I just found out that it can generate and translate parts os a bitmap, so it is possible to achieve something similar. Probably some advanced user could make actual particle system with it? It seems to be a programming language in itself -- I do not know if it's Turing-complete.

@K1TesseraEna, But then you think the thread should be considered closed if there is no proper particle systems for GIMP?

I really do not know if Particle Pro can be used in GNU/Linux. In any case the idea is if something does not exist, discuss other possibilities although they are not exactly the solution.

I wonder if G'MIC sequencing could be used for this?

Here is an example using sequencing-edges on fire.
APNG

GIF

I know this is completely dumb example, but it just demonstrates Mathmap translation function. Somebody who is more competent in Mathmap language could write a script which gives UI for multiplying an bitmap and animating it with translations according to some curve. That would work as shoe-string particle system, I think.