Firefly glow effect

Archived Forums Questions & Answers
1

So I’ve created a firefly effect using a particle system and have them fading in and out fairly nicely although the glow effect isn’t quite as nice as I’d like it to be. I’m using Unity Pro and wanted to know if there’s some way to have the particles actually glow? Right now I just added the Sparkles2 material to the particles but it just fades from a white to green/yellowish color then fades out completely. I haven’t seen anything online that gives off a realistic glow similar to fireflies. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Like, pulsing in-and-out glowing? In Shuriken (the not-legacy particle system), you can animate the color and size of particles in the system's inspector. Add a few 'keyframes' in and they can pulse-glow.

 –

Glow11 seems to have nice features for this.

 –

1 Answer

1
2

I have done something similar, you can give this a shot.

Screenshot

9821-screenshot38.png

Setting Part 1

9822-screenshot.39.png

It is very hard to get answers on visual effect, because the only way to make sure people gets what you want is to give them the visualization that you cannot produce yet.

Setting Part 2 [9823-screenshot.40.png|9823] To note, I am not using the default-particle for this. This is the particle material I used: [9824-screenshot.42.png|9824] The particle material I am using can be found by importing Unity's per-made particle assets. I think it is called fairy-something. It is more opaque than the default particle so it gives a more solid glow.

 –

Ironically I've done something very similar. Here is a tutorial I made earlier today, http://youtu.be/aIyKpFNEBzY As you can see I have a decent looking effect, but I wanted something like this, http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5g9nzly7x1r5li32o1_400.jpg Thoughts? edit For my particle material I used "sparkle2".

 –

Can you provide one more reference photo? Having 2 is better than just one.

 –

As far as I know, it's not practical to make particles cast light, if that's what you're trying for (though you can if you move point lights around with the particles, you'll run into issues pretty quick if you have more than a couple). It is possible to emulate the effect with decals, which involves traversing the particle array and moving decals around each frame. Might be expensive. A shader might also be able to help, but I know zero about them. :S

 –

Thanks, actually I was trying to find a way to use really small lights floating around but I'm sure that would be way too costly to generate. I suppose what I have will do, thanks all for your help!

 –