I’ve recently starting working with particle systems on 3DS max and I want to put them into Unity. I’ve tried to make firework type of things but I can’t seem to get the animation to work in Unity.
I’m like a real beginner in all of this so any advice will help.
HI, welcome to the forum!
If you create a particle system in another application, the only things you will be able to import into Unity are the textures - the animation effect itself has to be recreated in Unity.
However, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with Unity’s particles. For the firework explosion, you will probably want to start off with an empty game object. Add an ellipsoid particle emitter, a particle animator and a particle renderer to it (menu Component > Particles). Create a new material for the particle texture, using the Particles/Additive shader. If you look at the object in the scene, you should see some activity from the system, although it won’t look much like a firework yet.
If you go to the particle emitter panel in the inspector and set the tangent velocity Z component above zero, you should see the particles fly outward from the centre. Enable “one shot” on the emitter to see explosive bursts of particles rather than a steady stream. Then, in the particle animator, set the damping to a very low value, say about 0.1. You should see the explosion appear to slow down with air resistance like a real firework. Tweak the tangent velocity and the damping until you get the right effect for your scene.
For a bit of extra detail, try setting the force value in the particle animator. This should mainly be in the negative Y direction to simulate the particles’ falling slightly under gravity, but you can also use X and Z to give the effect of drifting in the wind. Varying the size grow value might also look good, depending on the exact effect you are looking for.
Wow thank you, I will try that.
Andeeee, What about if you make the paricles into a metablob can Unity handle the changing vertex count?
Not sure what you mean - perhaps you could explain in a bit more detail?
Normally particles can’t be exported from 3d apps to a game engine. All the game engines I have used have their own particle tools.
The Blob mesh won’t work in the same way it does in Max in Unity. Mainly because it would be difficult to render in real time. It’s a fairly complex surface.
FYI : A blob mesh is a meta surface created frame by frame by treating all particles in a given system as metaballs to derive a meta-surface from. Useful for faking water effects.