I’ve looked at several systems for guiding a particle system along a spline. They all seem to disable the emission/shape and use a radial distance from the spline. I’m trying to set it up to work like the edge shape does. Think conveyor belt. Has anyone worked through this? Thanks.
The simplest solution I think is to create a spline using iTween / iTweenPath- you can then just move the particle system smoothly along the spline, emitting and using a trail effect as it goes. If you want simultaneous emission along the entire length (or a simulation of it), you can move from start to finish and then reset position and start over again, over and over, very quickly. That way, you should be able to emit from the entire length and still have a directional flow I think.
There are also some UAS options like Spline Particles that can move both the emitter and the particles themselves along a spline. I’m really not sure how the latter is implemented though, and I hate tools that don’t include source and don’t use namespaces properly, but it’s there if you want it. shrugs
Thank you for your reply. I follow the idea of what you are saying, but i’m not sure how I would set up the emission to achieve what I want. I am actually trying to simulate a conveyor belt. I guess I can try to squash the circle, see the link below.
I did look at that spline particles asset, all of the images look like they are doing the same thing. I clicked on the authors ‘official website’ and immediately closed it, it didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.
So it’s just the shape you’re having trouble with? You could just build a mesh programmatically using the spline’s waypoints, if you want a wider flat surface that follows the same path. Then you just set the shape as Mesh, assign the mesh, and make the particles emit from the triangles. Generating the mesh shouldn’t be that difficult- this post on Unity Answers has some information, but even just Googling “generate mesh from spline” should give tons of results as procedural mesh generation isn’t a rare need.
I don’t know how you have this set up or how you’re running it though- you might be able to just get away with setting it to Box and making it flat.
Yea, all shape and emission settings appear to be overridden. One example I’ve found distributes the particle based on rotation and distance. I’ll modify that to X+Y.