by DST » Thu Jun 18, 2009 3:06 am
Drawn fx is the way ge was intended to work. Its like the thing with animation ones and twos - twos is drawing every other frame, then duplicating it to make twice as much animation, instead of one drawing per frame.
Often, things drawn in 2's are better because - people simulate the movement of things, with blurs, trails, and high tension drawing; whereas with 1's people tend to just draw what's there. plain old boring reality. DragonballZ made great use of twos by often drawing goku as just a blur. It really got the point across nicely, without trying to overdo the frames. They packed the tension into the individual frames itself. Even if they weren't animated, they'd still look awesome!
My point is, a particle fx system does not end up looking any better than drawn fx. In many cases, it looks worse. Your water might be more complex in an fx system, but most of that complexity will be random and not really necessary to achieve the effect, while only a small portion of the particles do exactly what they should.