we’re happy to introduce Magical Box, our upcoming advanced Particle Engine. It’s a replacement for the built-in Particlesystem and based on a modular concept for maximum expandability, so adding your own emitter types (defining emission shape and vector) and parameters (i.e. functions that process particles based on age/distance/whatever) is a piece of cake. A single mesh can render unlimited emitters and only used parameters are calculated. It features timeline control for complex multi emitter effects, a callback based event system and good 2D support.
More details, including a full list of features can be found at our website.
Update 05/06: First videos available(viewing at 1080p/Fullscreen recommended)
Right now we’re about to fix the last editor glitches, complete writing the docs, format the sources and preparing everything for release. That should be done within the next few weeks, so stay tuned!
Sorry, that’s still up in the air, but assume that it will fit in the range of other bigger extensions.
By now v1.00 is ready and we are reviewing the source (removing rants, ironing xml comments, those sort of things) and writing additional online docs now. We hope to finish it this week…
without knowing GeniusFX but after looking through it’s webpage and docs, I would say that the design approach is completely different.
1.) Magical Box doesn’t use Unity’s ParticleSystem/Renderer! It has it’s own particle manager that lets you bundle tons of “particle systems” (we call it emitters) within a single mesh/drawcall. This includes automatic texture management and a high degree of particle data reuseability.
2.) It’s modular, i.e. you plug parameters (color, size, gravity etc…) into emitters to use a particular feature. This way you can skip unneeded calculations, also it allows you to easily cut/copy/paste parameters between emitters. Also parameters (like all other Magical Box objects) are components that use a individual GameObject, so you can work with them like you would with all other Unity objects: Add scripts, alter their transform, prefab them etc…
3.) Both emittertypes (=emission shapes like circle,sphere…) and parameters are designed around the idea of modularity and expandability. So instead of creating workarounds for a particular problem in your game (e.g. if you want a circular emitter that somehow bends to the mouse pointer), just create your own emitters and parameters that match your problem 100% and that integrates seamless into our editor. Creating your own emitters and parameters is easy, the online docs will cover this topic in detail.
Magical Box will be released early next week both in the AssetStore and on Avangate, where we will have an Early Adopter special offer. The regular price will be around 120$.
Hey, that’s a wonderful web demo; this looks flexible and really cool.
One question, though: what is performance like, and what are the bounding conditions- is the bounds per-event, or is it limited to an upper number of particles? I.E., in the demos, I noticed immediately that we’re never dealing with thousands of particles, which Unity’s current system can do, and none of the test scenarios allow us to play with particle count. So, basically, it’s hard to judge the utility; can we use this for stuff like fake-volumetric explosion events, weather simulation, that sort of thing? Or is it strictly for uses where we want a lot of power, but aren’t going to need several thousand particles?
In the demo please check out “Clone Wars”. Each time you press “Instantiate” an emitter will be cloned and added to the particle system. On my office box (an older Nvidia Quadro NVS 290) it drops to 20fps when rendering 4300 particles on screen (=86 individual emitters!) in the webplayer. However, performance depends on how many parameters you plug in each emitter and of course what shader and billboarding method you use.
Depending on what you want to achieve, you can disable Magical Box rendering at all and connect other things (meshes, colliders, your own structures, shader-input) to the particles and use the editor for it.Coming with the next version (after release) we add the possibility to add your own data objects to particles in a consistent way (well, it’s almost done but didn’t made it for the 1.00 deadline) together with a lot of new events, so interop with other systems will be a lot easier.
I own it but i am not able to use the demo package. As on extract there are number of folders with name can not be understand. Is it possible to have a normal unity project type structure?
What do you mean by a “normal project structure”? If you create a project and import both the engine and demo package, everything should be fine. If not, please provide more details (like error messages, screenshots, your OS version language), preferable at our support forum, so we can investigate what’s going on.
Nice web demo but,I
wont Particle follow spline path., emitter is static and particle follow path. so i modify spline particale also change path in real time .
not emitter follow path becuse i modify spline path not chge in real time .
as I answered you already by mail, this can be easily done with a custom parameter that set’s particles’ heading or position to follow a spline. The most work will be to write a spline script (or choose one of the existing solutions flying around). On the other side, integrating one into MB to animate emitters as well as particles along splines could be useful in general to create some nice effects, so perhaps this will find it’s way into one of the next updates.
Particle System overview
Emitter settings
Parameter editing
