Fast Forward For Effects

There's no denying how spectacular particles can be for eye popping animations. This tut will show just one of the many great effects you can do with an emitter.

Particles: Right Click> Insert new object> GENERAL> Particles, are optimized to take up less CPU, and memory. This means you can throw a lot of them out there and worry less about performance. That being said they are also somewhat simplified in that you can't do frames, and they have to be of an equal size length, and width.

You also need to make sure they have a transparent border as that tend to help them blend together.

The thing to remember is that the emitter works a bit like the Bullet behavior. You give it an angle, and a speed to shoot the particle out at. Then you set how many you want it to "spray" out and how wide that cone to be. Think spray paint. Since this is like a smoke type effect, and not an explosion, set it to continuous.

Even though the object is made to be lightweight you still get a ton of properties, which can be confusing, but makes it highly customizable.

Really you will want to do a lot of experimenting to see what you like best.

Remember that they still have to recycle since you are creating new textures continuously, but also that the fade makes that part less noticeable.

Since it takes a little bit to populate the area you will want to make the particles "Fast Forward" for things like video.

+ System: On start of layout

-> gasparticle: Fast-forward 120 seconds

-> actiontext: Tween "" property Width to 586 in 0.5 seconds (Default, destroy: No, loop: No, ping pong: No, repeat count: 1)

Basically the Particle object has a relatively new feature where you can actually fast forward... well more like skip the time it takes to fill in the area.

Here's a link to the source: Galaxy Gaming