Adding Ring Emitter to Particle system?

Dear Epic,

Can we request that you add a ring emitter to your particle system? We used to wrote it for our previous MMO and it’s very essential in creating many cool particle effects.
Ideally, it will emit a close-loop ring that use a tiled texture along its polygons with begin/end radius, begin/end width and begin/end height parameters like the pic below.
(There also can be many other control parameters, but those are the essential starting points.)

15633-ringemitter.jpg

Right now the closest thing we have is a ribbon particle, and it’s very hard to create a nice ring from it. Not to mention fuzzy texture when the ring is very large when it’s create with normal sprite. (Something you don’t have to worry here because it use tiled texture.)

Please consider this as additional assest to your particle system.

Best,

Hey KillerPenguin -

I will pass your suggestion along to our engineers for their consideration in feature releases of the engine. In the meantime, I might suggest using a mesh emitter with a ring mesh from Max, Maya or Blender and a two sided material to achieve nearly the same effect. They key to proper emission is to have the pivot point in the bottom center open area of your ring mesh so that when you scale the size of the mesh it can scale uniformly in all three axes.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

ooh that’s a great idea Eric!

I might try that myself!

Thanks!

Rama

Well, importing it from Max doesn’t allow real-time editing, not to mention that morphing many rings to get all the right stretching at different time for different effects with the script also is very time consuming.

So I guess I’m more eager to know if this will soon be added or should I just come up with other methods. Would appreciate it if you could share any conclusive decision about this.

Best Regard,