Particles everywhere on level load

Development Rendering
1

Hey there. I’m just getting started with the particle system and it seems pretty comprehensive.

I’m trying to add a constant wind-debris effect to my level. At the moment I’ve got some emitters that throw out debris from a point when the level starts but they drift quite slowly and it takes a while to cover the level.

  1. How would you go about making an emitter that starts a level with particles already deployed? Is there some way for the emitter initial spawn location to be a distributed uniform constant?

  2. I’m having trouble getting my head around the durations. I have one kind of emitter that seems to go on emitting forever and another one that does emits for a while then stops. I’ve been through all the settings and tweaked them, but I’m not all that sure what’s stopping my second emitter from emitting all the time.

  3. My particles are coming to rest just beneath the surface of my landscape, rather than on top, so they’re hidden. What gives?

2

Bump, really keen to solve the landscape collision issue.

3

I know this is old, but there is a initial location which you can set. About the collision. There is a module called collision. Just add it and check what you want to do when the particles collide.

4

Hey Antidamage -

If you click in the black area of to the side of your emitters you will get the Particle System’s Settings. In those settings you can set a warm up time which will allow you to have your system to start as if it had already been running for x seconds. Usually the duration is based on the emitters loops and if it is 0 it will loop forever and any other number would be a finite number of loops, so check your required module and you should see a difference there. Assuming that you have a collision module as DJ_Lectr0 says, there has been an issue with Landscape collsion in the past, so let me know if after you add collision if you are still getting the stopping below the landscape.

Hope that helps you out -

Eric Ketchum

5

The warm-up should work, thanks! I’ve got my emitter duration set to zero as well as the maximum count disabled. I’ll see what happens once it’s got a warmup on it.

The particles have been set up to collide correctly, and occasionally they do stop above the landscape, but mostly they stop just below the surface of it. I’ve tried adjusting the collision thickness for the landscape with no results.

Here’s above and below the landscape. Most of the leaves stopped just below the grass and only show on very steep slopes:

6

Actually, is there any way to get particles to act like 3d shapes, lie flat against the ground, etc? They just seem to face the camera at the moment.

7

Hey Antidamage -

You can try setting the screen alignment to Velocity where the partiucle will face its movement direction always, but what you really probably want is to add the lock axis module which will keep the particles from moving orientation outside of a particular axis, so for the leaves would probably want to lock the z axis (depending on your setup) and then have the fall.

8

That’s not a bad idea. I just discovered the mesh particle type-data as well. Using a slightly curved plane has solved the problem of the particles stopping beneath the landscape as well! Thanks Eric!