I have been trying to find a way of making particles follow a spline path for ages. In unity 3.5 and its new “Shuriken” particle system they introduced the concept of “Velocity over lifetime” curves. I though this was the perfect solution for making what I needed. It has took some time, but here you have it!
I have designed this system to be mobile friendly so all the heavy lifting is done in the editor, so the performance cost on runtime is ZERO. It doesn’t matter if you have have 10 or 1000 particles the cost is exactly the same with this system On or Off.
Because of this optimization it has two things that you must know:
You can’t change the path at runtime
In long or complex paths there is an acummulaitve error that can lead the particles to not follow the path perfectly, and produce some deviations
In this package you will find:
A system for creating splines to use only with this package
A script to make particles follow a spline
A script for making an emitter follow a spline
An example scene
As always all the source code is available (except for the spline drawing), so you can tweak whatever you need.
The package has been submitted to the store and its waiting for approval. I can’t wait to see the amazing effects you can make with this!
Yes it works perfectly on mobile. And you can of course attach the spline to a gameObject and move that. You can also attach a spline particle system to another spline particle system and do things like the one in the example “13- extra spiral”
Hi I’ve just bought this of the asset store but I’m having issues with it. The spline editor doesn’t appear to be working so I can’t create splines or edit them unless I’m misunderstanding your documentation. The example scene runs fine and I can add a spline particle system to a new game object but I can’t add any points. Where is the append point button meant to show up that is mentioned in the documentation ? I see you have a splineeditor.dll so I’m assuming that’s meant to either bring up a window or menu option in the editor but it doesn’t appear to be showing up. I’m using Unity 4.2 . Please let me know how to fix this issue , thanks.
So, this is pretty cool. I’m not sure how to increase the speed along the path though. If I increase the start speed, it just stretches out the original path. If I adjust the duration, that doesn’t seem to have an effect. I have a heart animation and I need the chamber to fill up really fast and then evacuate it equally as fast. Any thoughts?
The speed along the path is determined by the particle life. As a rule of thumb you normally set the start speed to 0 for normal path following. There is a section in the docs that explain what happens if you set a random life value. And you are right, duration doesn’t have any effect on the particle speed.
Hey Eyeofgod…
Sweet product… Just bought your Spline Particles yesterday…
Should work rather well in my ski simulations for the Trail Map Runs, Moving Gondolas and chair lifts…
Your product comes with perfect timing…
I will post when your systems are in my simulation and are ready to review…
Two questions…
I am using your Fishes system that you created for my lift lines, rather than moving bitmaps will your system move actual meshes?
Is it possible to make the actual “Spline” show up in the game? As this could work well for the lift line cables.
Thanks
