Texture-based particle emission... Too tall of an order?

News & General Discussion
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So, if you’ve got some experience with some of the modeling packages like Maya’s and Max’s particle systems, chances are you are aware of texture-based particle emission.

What that is is basically a texture dictating the emission rates of a particle system… usually it’s a simple monochrome source image but sometimes it can be more (where the colour value dictates the orientation or other qualities of the particle that’s being emitted.)

Now, I have a lot of really neat ideas for ways to implement something like this that’d really take a game’s “wow” factor right up to 11 (things such as the froth of the boiling ocean, the glimmering effect of the sea on a calm sunny day, hair and fur systems, etc.) But not knowing if this can even be done in Unity is the biggest hurdle.

So… is this even a thing that Unity could potentially do? I would imagine that if it can’t yet there is an opportunity for an asset in the asset store :wink:

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Not built-in, but since you can set particles through code, you can script it.

–Eric

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You mean something like these??

Atomizer $10


Particulizer $25

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A lot of these are really close but not quite what I’m looking for.

I’m trying to get a video recorded with what I mean since that might help better than describing it. (and I’m kinda hoping that if this is a thing that can be done, i’d love to apply it to a trail-renderer… so, i would assume that it’d also require some shader trickery as well.)