Improving performance with Particle Playground (Pro only)

You can animate a large number of similar objects so that they move independently but produce a consistent group behavior overall, such as falling snow, swarming bees, or exploding fireworks. The following guidelines can help you work more efficiently:

• When you're generating a Particle Playground effect, keep an eye on the Info palette to see how many particles are being produced. If an effect contains more than 10,000 particles, it can significantly slow rendering.
• The Grid and Layer Exploder generate particles on every frame, which may generate too many particles for the effect you're creating and slow down rendering. To avoid continuous particle generation, animate these controls to decline to zero over time: Layer Exploder, Radius of New Particles, Grid Width and Height, Particle Radius, and Font Size. Then Particle Playground generates new particles only at the start of a sequence.
• When you apply a Particle Playground effect to a layer, the particle positions aren't limited to the bounds of that layer. To control particles that you can't see or that appear near the edge of the image, use a Selection or Property Map that's larger than the area of the Particle Playground layer. Also, note that After Effects takes an image map's alpha channel into account. If you want transparent areas of your map to affect the particles, precompose the map layer with a black solid behind it.

To specify field-rendering with a Particle Playground effect, select Enable Field Rendering in the Particle Playground options dialog box. Then Particle Playground calculates the simulation at double the frame rate of the current composition, which is what field rendering requires.