Hey guys,
I’m now working about 2 months with Unity and I slowly get the hang of it. But a skill which is really lacking would be working with Particles, I just can’t make anything decent with the Particle Systems.
Are there any good Particle Tutorials out there which teach, how to make really nice effects?
Are the default Particle Materials the only ones, or is there a source where I can download more of them?
For example I would like to make something like in Tiny Wings, where a lot of Stars appear when you get in Fever Moder
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0 (after 0:33)
I appreciate any help.
Thanks
One thing that could really help you create cooler particle effects is to utilize the built-in animation system. By attaching an animation component to the particle system, that opens up all of those variables to allow you to control them in really quick and easy ways by using animations!
Particles take a little bit of getting used to but they are fairly straightforward to learn just by fiddling with the different parameters in isolation and seeing what the effect is.
You can get the 2D star explosion effect just by starting with the default particle system (menu: GameObject > Create Other > Particle System) and changing a few parameters. Firstly, enable the One Shot setting on the emitter to release all the particles as a single burst rather than a continuous stream. If you set the Z component of the Tangent Velocity, you should see that the particles move outwards during the burst. Now, got to the Ellipsoid and set the Z component to zero and the X and Y components to a small value. The ellipsoid in question is the volume from which the particles are launched. With a Z value of zero, the ellipsoid is not a solid volume but rather a 2D circle, and by making the height and width of the circle very small, you make the particles look as though they are coming from a single point.
You should already see that the explosion looks somewhat like the one in the video but you can improve things further. If you set the damping value on the emitter to a value below 1 (but still above zero), you should see the particles slow down over time. A typical explosion/firework burst starts with a high tangent velocity but also with the damping set low to give the impression of a rapid explosion being quickly slowed down by air resistance. You will also notice that the stars in the video reduce in size as they spread out, which is easily achieved in the particle animator (set the Size Grow parameter to a negative value to make the particles shrink instead of growing).
As for new particle materials, they are fairly easy to make if you have Gimp, Photoshop or another similar app available. Create a new material, and then set the shader to one of the ones from the Particles submenu. The most useful ones for most purposes are Additive (to give a glowing effect) and Alpha Blended (which lets you have a non-glowing particle with an arbitrary shape). With the Additive shader, any black background areas in the image will appear transparent, while bright areas of colour will tend to accumulate as they are overlaid on each other and look like bright sparkles. For an alpha blended particle, you will need to create the transparent areas using the image editor but this is usually a fairly straightforward process.
I’ve attached an example explosion to help get you started, although you should probably experiment with a few of the parameters to see what they do and perhaps stumble across something really cool 
573865–20464–$Stars.zip (3.37 KB)