Hello. In this video I will show you some tips of Simple Particle Ribbon
This Unity asset is available for free on the Unity Asset Store
You can click the link in the description below or search in the Unity Asset Store
Let's get started. The first thing I want to show is my working scene
It's named "default_scene" under the "scene" folder
I use it to create new effect because it contains all the basic elements to accompany the newborn effect
It has a camera group which I will talk about later...
A plain ground plane, a test character (aka "masochistic dummy"), a point light (it can be directional light, but anyway)...
And finally the "effect container" prefab
Any particle effect will be put under this empty container for modification or testing
The reason I'm doing this is because I can change the container's position and rotation...
...without messing with the actual parent effect prefab's. I want to keep it all zeros (position at least)...
...because its position serves as the "pivot" (simply "central point") of the effect itself
If you apply change to the effect which has already been saved to your project folder, the new transform values will be applied as well
If you want to move the whole effect, then move the container prefab instead
For example, now I'm moving it from the dummy's chest to his right palm
And then I'm still free to apply change to the effect without changing its pivot
The next tip is the "always on top" game objects. UI designer/programmer should be very familiar with this trick
But first let me disable the slave prefab because it's not "always on top"...
As you can see in the "scene" window (left), the glow particles intersect with the dummy (which I don't like) because both objects are rendered by the same camera
But in the "game" window (right), the glow particles always appear before the dummy
That's because I changed the layer of the glow particle of master prefab to "TransparentFX"
This layer isn't rendered by the main camera. You remove this layer from the "culling mask"
I created a new child camera under the main camera with all-zero position/rotation
this child camera only renders the "TransparentFX" layer and has higher camera depth...
...than the depth of the main camera. The camera depth determines the rendering order: lower depth will be rendered first, IOW behind anything of higher depth.
The next thing I want to talk about is the subemitter behavior and interpolation of Shuriken Particle System
Simple Particle Ribbon makes use of the subemitter function extensively
The issue is that the lifetime and position of the particles from subemitter are not accurate and not interpolated during the preview
It worsens if you have more than one master emitter controlling the same subemitter
Now I have disabled one master emitter and the subemitter acts properly during the preview
This is not the case when you "play" the scene, so if your effect used subemitter, you do need to "play" it to get the accurate result
The next topic is scaling. I understand the scale of my dummy can be quite different than your project
Obviously the scale of my particle effects is designed for my dummy but you can't scale the particle effect in its transform/scale...
Let say the character scale of your project is double of mine...
First let me move the container position slightly upper so it's not between my dummy's thighs...
Apparently the effect looks bit small compared to the dummy
To solve this, go to the master (not parent) particle prefab, expand "velocity over lifetime"
Increase the ranges of the curve graph of X/Y/Z velocities. In this case I just double them
For safety's sake, after each time you have typed the value in the curve graph, press "enter" to confirm, otherwise the value might not be registered.
Finally increase the "start size" values of all particle prefabs and it's good to go
You can modify the speed/velocity/force of the subemitter as well, just experiment by yourself.
If you make a mess, just revert it, or delete the effect from the hierarchy and drag it from the project folder to hierarchy again
We're almost done. The last section is to showcase the 3 new effects in the v1.01 update
Now I remove the existing effect prefab from the effect container...
load the new effect from project folder to hierarchy under the container
But I also need to revert the scale of the dummy...
And the position of the effect container as well...
That's better
The new effects make use of the ability to load 2 subemitters from the same master emitter
It's a shame that you can't load 3 or more. The workaround is to let the subemitter load another subemitter, but this complicates the whole effect tree
The Liberate 2.1.1 (smoke) is something I want to apologize for poor supervision
The bigger trail looks so low-quality because the emission rate is too high
to fix that, lower the rate from 170 to 40 because too much overlap of alpha will sharpen the texture poorly
Lowering the emission rate also means that you can increase the alpha/opacity of the particles
The default material "glow_alpha" loads the glow texture with shadow for volumetric illusion
You can change the material of the slave/subemitters to "glow_add" (additive) if you don't want the volumetric effect
(Master emitter in this particular effect doesn't render particle so it's irrelevant to change the material)
That's it. Thanks for watching and if you find this video useful, subscribe to my channel for notification of new videos
See you
