I’m just learning using Unity, so this might be a silly question, but where do I find the documentation on what the parameters for the new Particle System in Unity 4 do? The user interface only links to a page like this:
but that doesn’t really tell much and it even seems to show different modules in the screenshots. Well, the reason why it doesn’t tell much is probably because it’s about the particle system not its components. Well, I found this page as well:
which seems to be more useful, but the modules still seem to have very different parameters. So are there old and new versions even of the Shuriken particle system or am I missing something?
Of course it would be easy if the parameters were intuitive, but I don’t really feel like they were. For example there is the “Start color” parameter collection with min and max colors and gradients as well as a “Min Max state”. But what does the “min max state” do? If I have it as zero, all the particles are the same, but if I have it as 2 or higher, the particles randomize having all four colors: max gradient, min gradient, max color, min color. So the values 0 and 1 are perhaps different, but all the values from 2 to 32767 offer the same mixed result? What is this?!
And how do I do such a simple basic thing as making the particles slowly fade away? There are things like “Rotation by Speed Module”, but how about something like “alpha/color by lifetime” module?
I did notice that there is a way to use the “legacy particle systems”, so using them could be an option, but using the new one would sound like a preferrable solution, so where can I find instructions on how to use it?
The pages you were looking at are about the same particle system.
If you compare the second image in the first link, and the first image in the second link, you can see that they are the same.
The reason they may look so different is because the two pages are showing different parts of shuriken.
Thanks for the reply! The problem wasn’t that that the two links had different content, but rather that what I have in Unity 4 is different to both those pages. It’s also different to what exists in that youtube video about Unity 3.5. I’ll study this again in the evening, but to me it seemed like :
I couldn’t add new modules like in the video (and like some tuts suggested). I could just disable or enable the ones that existed there.
It didn’t have eg. the “color over lifetime” which could probably be used eg. for that fading out purpose.
Quite importantly in general, I tried getting info on the parameters by eg. hovering the mouse on them, but I didn’t get the info - although apparently according to the video that should work. I’m using this on a PC instead of a Mac, but that shouldn’t be the reason for not having the descriptions, right? So I still don’t know what eg. the “Min Max state” really means.
So it seems like even the new particle system is different in 4 than it was in 3.5, and that the documentation would lack in that part. But it might also be that I’ve just been missing something here.
