GenArts Inc., the premier provider of specialized visual effects software for the film, television and video industries, announced today a definitive agreement to acquire particleIllusion™ and all related products and technologies from wondertouch LLC. The acquisition includes particleIllusion SE, all Emitters and Pro Emitters, particleIllusion for AE, and all additional intellectual property from wondertouch LLC. As part of the acquisition, Alan Lorence, the former CEO of wondertouch and creator of particleIllusion, will join GenArts as a full-time developer.
wondertouch and particleIllusion will continue to operate as stand-alone brands, separate from GenArts Sapphire™, Monsters™ and Raptors™. Customers can continue to obtain wondertouch products and support exactly as they have in the past by visiting www.wondertouch.com. In addition, particleIllusion will be sold through the same reseller channels as before and new emitters will continue to be delivered on their customary regular basis.
Separately, GenArts has announced that the highly anticipated wondertouch plug-ins for Adobe After Effects will be called particleIllusion for After Effects, and will ship in December 2009. Please visit www.wondertouch.com for more information about particleIllusion for After Effects.
“In 2008, we laid out a vision to accelerate GenArts’ growth via acquisition, innovation and strategic partnerships,” said Katherine Hays, CEO of GenArts. “We chose this path to align the company more fully with our customers who are shifting their emphasis away from in-house visual effects tools development, and toward a greater reliance on standardized tools from trusted vendors. This acquisition is another key step toward achieving that vision. The addition of particleIllusion not only provides GenArts a well respected product today, but its core particles technology offers an important foundation upon which we can further develop the types of new and innovative products that our customers require from their trusted vendor. We’re extremely excited about this acquisition, and we welcome Alan to the GenArts family.”
Created by Lorence, particleIllusion is a sprite-based particle effects application designed to provide the most comprehensive and efficient particle effects creation workflow. Utilizing hardware-accelerated rendering, it is now used worldwide by creative professionals working in film post-production and pre-visualization, standard and HD video, commercial broadcast, motion graphics, and game content creation. With particleIllusion, visual effects artists have access to thousands of presets that they can use to create innumerable effects such as smoke, fire, explosions, watery ripples, sparkles, colorful artistic fantasies and more.
“I am thrilled to join the world-class GenArts development team and return to my passion of continuing to evolve particleIllusion,” said Lorence. “I look forward to the support and backing of such a creative organization as we explore ways to advance the state of the art of visual effects, and inspire film and video artists to bring their stories to life.”
To hear directly from GenArts CEO Katherine Hays and wondertouch CEO Alan Lorence about this acquisition, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNL0a2Pa8x4.
About GenArts
GenArts, Inc. is the premier provider of specialized digital visual effects for the film, broadcast and video industries. The GenArts Sapphire, Monsters and Raptors portfolio equips digital artists with a collection of state-of-the-art image processing and synthesis effects such as glows, light rays, lens flares, lightning, film damage, fire and fluid effects. The effects seamlessly integrate as software plug-ins into leading editing and compositing systems from Adobe, Apple, Avid, Autodesk, Assimilate, Eyeon, FilmLight, The Foundry, Quantel and SGO. The company was founded in 1996 in Cambridge, Mass. www.genarts.com.