Hey there guys ,
Since I’m a beginner in Unity ,I only lately started using the Shuriken particle system. Although I’m honestly impressed by its flexibility and potential ,my very specific and highly demanding application brings Shuriken on its knees.
So ,my missile cruises at a speed of mach 2 (soon 3.5 if I resolve this) ,or 680 m/s. At this speed ,the trail of smoke it leaves looks very thin (length-wise) and large gaps appear between particles ,even with a blazing particle generation rate of 2000 p/s. Not only that ,but in order to make the trail fade realistically ,I had to let the particles live for 10 seconds. Needless to say ,I had to bump the max number of particles like 10 or more times to accommodate for the countless particles that would exist within the world each moment. In the end ,the impact on the system was so immense that with only 2 missiles (the missile’s bodies ,fins ,etc…) and 2 particle systems (1 for each missile’s trail) in an otherwise completely empty scene ,my framerates started dropping below 60fps. By the way ,my computer has an R9 290 Vapor X factory overclocked GPU ,an i5 4690 processor and 2x 4GB 1600MHz CL7 memory sticks ,which leans towards the high-end category of gaming rigs. I also tried the distance emission mode ,which didn’t help with the final performance ,but just didn’t create that a huge particle mess when the missile was still going slow (while also creating the problem that the missile would only emit smoke when moving). So ,can I do here? For me ,it pretty much seems like I’ll have to stick with ultra low quality ,bubble-like trails other than realistic smoke columns in order to maintain some performance. Of course ,particles are set with color ,size ,speed dampening over time settings as well as size over speed settings to give the trail that realistic smokey feel (of which I don’t know the grade of performance impact really). This is approximately the realism level I’m trying to achieve :
So ,is there any way around this? Should I at all be using the particle emitter for my applications? Is there anything I’m doing wrong? Any good advice would be greatly appreciated!
P.S. I tried to use inherit velocity property to further improve the feeling of the trail ,but it completely messed it instead ,making the smoke leave in “puffs” and not continuously and also created a second trail originating from the particle emitter with different initial speed (what the actual heck?!). Furthermore I discovered in the manual that inherit velocity should be a module (like shape or emission…) ,but for me ,it is just a property under the gravity modifier and over the simulation space general properties in the main module. Why?
