Particle System Shape Animation Over Life of the Emitter

News & General Discussion
1

Hey, I’ve been using unity for many years now and I’ve seen a bunch of options get added over time, but one that I would really like to see, and I don’t understand why it’s not in already, is a way to change the rotation/position/scale of the Shape over the lifetime of the effect in the particle system itself.

Right now, all we can enter is a static number and the only workaround is to create an animation file and if I want to preview the VFX along with that animation, unless I get help from a wizard programmer, the only way is to click play really fast in the animation window and then on the particle system to see a result.

We can use curves/gradients to change the start color/size of the particles over the life of the emitter. Why can’t we do this in the shape emitter?

Suppose I have a sphere shape and the emitter emits for 1 second, I would like to use a curve that scales up that sphere so that the particles get emitted from larger sphere progressively.

Unreal has been allowing us to do this for years already.

1 Like
2

Guess I’m gonna be that guy… creating a simple script that changes the shape module on the particle system is very trivial even for beginner programmers.

have a quick look at the API docs: Unity - Scripting API: ParticleSystem
look at “Accessing module properties”

I’m not saying unity shouldn’t provide a solution for people that just don’t wanna look at code, I’m just saying it doesn’t require a wizard.

3

So with this doc I’m supposed be able to modify the interface of the particle system or is it for assigning a component to each particle system that I want to have this behavior and then I also have to type numbers and stuff in that component? What if I change the duration of the emitter?

Thanks for trying to help but I have no idea where to begin and it’s not even in our pipeline to have code reviews for artist scripts.