twisting air column particles

Unity Engine
1

So here’s what I want: I want a column of air that has particle effects flying upwards, twisting around the center a la a tornado. Unlike a tornado, however, I don’t want these particles to spread out; I want the width of this column to remain constant.

Using a combination of 7 rotation axis in the particle animator, and x velocity, I’ve been able to get almost what I want. The problem is that as the particles move upwards they gradually start spreading out.

Any suggestions?

2

If you set the Z component of the tangent velocity slightly negative and set the damping below 1 in the particle animator, you can make the particles stay roughly within a column (although they will still spread a bit). Failing that, you can access the emitter’s particles array from a script and animate the particles directly.

3

Yeah, that seems to be working pretty well. I’ll tweak it a bit, and it looks like it’ll work out nicely. Thank you very much!