I’ve been trying to create a particle system to emulate floating dust in a scene. The problem is the scene is procedurally generated, so my solution has been to place the particles on the player so they follow them around (with sim space set to world).
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You can see maybe 30 bits of floating dust? That is actually more or less the result I want, but in order to achieve this I’ve had to spawn 10,000 particles…
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Why? Because the player can move, they can run in either direction. In order to ensure the same volume of particles regardless of where they go I’ve had to greatly expand the spawn radius and emission rate. Note I have already reduced the height of the sphere because the player doesn’t often move up and down.
This feels incredibly inefficient and I was wondering if anyone could come up with a better solution?
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For anyone interested, these are my current settings:
I found my own answer. I changed the particle shape to box and built a particle manager script that clones this box into a 3x3 grid. Thanks to the fog effect and size of the particles, I was able to make the grid pretty tight. The manager then keeps track of which theoretical ‘cell’ the player is in and if they’ve moved cells, the boxes at the back get teleported in front. As far as the player is concerned, it’s new dust they’re seeing, not the same dust they’d walked through a few seconds ago. The dust is continuously moving anyway so it wouldn’t look the same regardless. (Birds-eye view below)
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This solution means I don’t need to race with the player in spawning new dust particles at their new position, and consequently the spawning rate and particle lifetime can be adjusted without impacting any of that. Not only is the player seeing a little more dust than before, but the total particles has been reduced from 10k down to 2.7k.
