Hi, i hope this is the right place for it. Particle shuriken don’t seem to have a dedicated section in the forums…
Anyways, i’m wondering if there’s a plan to make more fields in the ParticleSystem to support curves/value over duration. Not per particle value over lifetime like Color over Lifetime etc, but values of the PS itself (like Gravity)
But for… well… the fields that doesn’t have the option to be “over lifetime”, like the ones in the Shapes
Specifically, the radius/radius thickness. The thickness, when set, will spawn particles at random between the range. I’d like to control that
Loop/Pingpong only controls the spawn position in circular/along edge, but nothing controls where it spawns along thickness
If anyone plays Dota, i’m talking about making Tidehunter’s Ravage (tentacles spawning in an outward ring).
Yes, doing it via scripting is possible, but i need it as part of the simulation for determinism across machine purpose. Just wondering why only some fields support this “over duration” before and not all
Cheers
Hi, yep this is the right place.
I’m not sure if we will look at making more curve fields. We are trying not to mess with the Particle System too much.
Is it possible to get what you want with an AnimationClip? You can keyframe the Radius Thickness property with the animation.
yes. It’s common in VFX to use keyframes like that and it does extend flexibility however it is not without slowdown limitations
playback in-editor is not quite supported - Timeline does not trigger simulation nor reset it cleanly.
A state-machine/mechanim and being in Play Mode to test is usually required. (this often slows creation/iteration time considerably; Shuriken’s advantage is how high-level/agile it is on its own.)
Shuriken system(s) also need extra keys to ensure replay + synchronization when trying to iterate/test like this : playOnAwake, Emission parameters, Loop, and Duration
These are often key’d/set with redundancies, adjusted per need to get behavior accuracy It often requires shuriken adjustments for test/iteration and then re-adjusted for final submission.
Yeah i’m mainly looking for something simulate-able
Achieving this in script/anim clip would work
Using sub emitter (ala vfx graph) to define the spawn point can work too. But my system doesn’t take into account sub emitters right now (related to particle jobs etc), altho this is just on my part and i can make it so
So the point of this thread is really, wondering why some fields has curve and some doesn’t. I guess it is that complicated to add more “variability” to the simulate-able ness of the system as a whole? Idk
In the early days of the Particle System, properties were mostly simple numbers, other than for properties where curves were an obvious and definite benefit, based on our very limited guesses at what the use-cases would be.
Then, over the years, users told us about use-cases for curves on lots of other properties. So we upgraded a lot to become curves. But this increases the memory footprint of a Particle System, and can come with some risk with version upgrades not upgrading the properties correctly.
So really it is just something that has evolved over the years based on a basic original design, plus a bunch of user requests.