I've often wondered about doing some sort of compositing, but I never seem to get around to doing the experiments.

Could you turn *everything* in your scene into some sort of light-and-shadow catchers and then add PopcornFX particles.  The objects could maybe get "lit" by the effects, and also hide particles that fall behind your objects.  Imagine everything being a flat black, for example, with no lighting other than the PopcornFX.  Could  you then composite that on top of your Iray render in your NLE?

I've not even had time to launch iClone for the last 3 weeks, and I miss it.  I look forward to having "hobby time" again.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

I have to agree. I have Iray and I like working with it, but there is no word about PopcornFX support. As I've said elsewhere it would be nice to know if it is technically impossible or if it just needs to be implemented. 

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Truth be told, I would not be so hesitant to embrace Iray if there were support for PopcornFX. Reallusion spent so much time giving us these neat tools and then they give us a render engine that can't render them. It's like they forgot. So if I want to switch to Iray, I can't do fire or muzzle fire or any of the other wonderful improvements that have come through. Hopefully, someone will come to their senses and work towards getting their Iray render to support PopcornFX. Personally, I think it would probably be easier for them to get their built in renderer to do SSS. I'm a fan of specific plugins to a point --but not when it cuts you off from doing the things you want to do.

Good observation. It can't be Popcorn or other particle, so what is it?

I looked closely at the clip and to me it looks like a video texture. There is no light coming from it and it is kind of flat. A video texture would render in Iray.

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I was watching the Iray render preview video. About 18 seconds in, there's a scene with a knight swinging a sword. In the background there's a torch burning. I was wondering if this effect was a popcornfx effect or was it achieved some other way? Can anyone shed some light on how it was done? It would really be nice if there was support for popcornfx but I'll settle for being able to do a campfire or a torch with Iray in some fashion. This is the video I was referring to.