I want to make a fire like distortion in the air above some lava, the problem is that for some reason the particle system I made for it doesnt work, I made a material that does seem to do the right thing when applied to a box:
My Particle system consists out of 2 emitters, 1 smoke emitter(just for testing purposes) and 1 “heatshimmer” emitter, this is the one that should distort/refract the air:
And here is the particle system in the level:
I checked if I had bad settings by applying a diffrent material but then it seems to work just fine. but as soon as I put my heatshimmer material on it doesnt show it anymore.
The Cascade and Level editor look identical to me… You’ll want to use the ‘Refraction’ input of the material to create heat shimmer, and Lerp between two values based on a grayscale texture. It looks to me like a material issue rather than one with cascade.
In my experience refraction isn’t as useful as the previous Distortion input we had though, not for particle systems anyway.
I’ve found that adding a normal map enhances the shimmer, especially if you’re talking about heat distortion looks at tileable noise maps, and panners.
Also Distortion values are IO values so very sensitive… 1.01 -1.9 for most normal materials… then there’s crystals and such at 2.0 and above…
So i was trying to tweak it into something nice, the shimmer particles look okey if they are above the grassy land but when they are above the lava they look way to pixelated:
