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Welcome to the tutorial of Unreal II ParticleSalamanders.
ParticleSalamanders are a type of ParticleGenerators used in Unreal II: The Awakening and
Unreal II eXpanded MultiPlayer
that unfortunately have a very small amount of documentation.
Yet the particle generator is very intuitive and very powerful,
allowing level designers to create good- looking particles quickly and easily.
So let's start the tutorial.
First of all,
find a good place to place your particles.
I will choose an outdoors area, like here.
This is my own map
which is a port of
XMP-Alcazar
from eXpanded MultiPlayer but it
is actually
in
Unreal II: The Awakening.
You may also create a Cube of Death that is a simple cube
and place it in an empty map.
Make sure that you have
real-time preview
turned off
then right-click
and add a ParticleSalamander
by using the command
"Add ParticleSalamander here".
Open its properties
and
turn back real-time preview.
You'll notice that
the icon has disappeared -
that means that it tries to show
particles
but there are no particles to show. That's why you have to have
real-time preview turned off
before
placing the ParticleSalamander.
Now the first thing you want to go to is
ParticleSalamander here
and
make sure
to have two things changed.
Now first is volume
Volume is a number of particles that you can see on
your screen at one time.
So
I will input twenty here.
Now the you'll see Min Volume that is the minimum
particles that you can see on the screen at the same time.
This is
for of those who have
settings that are different
in Unreal II: The Awakening
where you can select particle density and the
less particle density there is
the less particles you'll see, depending on the Min Volume (that's the minimal
they will see).
Naturally if you input zero, they will not see anything,
so make sure it is
something like
one, two, three, four, five or something like that.
now the spread is
basically the angle where
all the
particles will be sprayed at.
I will select
three hundred and sixty
so it'll
emit it
to all the sides
from the ParticleSalamander.
Now you will not see anything just yet -
that's because we need to add some Particle Templates which are
under ParticleGenerator.
Now of course make sure that
bOn is True,
otherwise it will not show anything.
Now the tricky part here is
as you can see
there is no add
button or anything like that.
Instead you have a drop-down list.
Once you select anything from the drop-down list, it automatically adds it to the
ParticleTemplates.
Now you can see that there are a lot of different things to choose from
Well, all of these are explained
in one of the posts that one of the original creators of
Unreal II: The Awakening has posted in
forums, I'll probably add links
to that in
my
description of the video.
Now let's see.
The usual thing that you want to select is
RotatingParticleTemplate.
That means that these particles will rotate
depending on the settings you choose
and they will always face your screen.
Now another thing that you may want to choose is
ParticleDecalTemplate.
These templates
make
it so that all the particles don't face your screen directly
but they are viewed much like a Static Mesh that is
facing
only one part of
the world
instead of your screen.
And
you may choose
StreakParticleTemplate.
Now if you click on this zero sign here,
you'll get another drop-down list.
This is a list of forces.
We will get to that later.
Let us add a
TexturedStreakParticleTemplate
which is right here.
Now we can select the texture
from TexturedStreakParticleTemplate.
As you can see, it has already been selected for us.
But we still cannot see anything.
So first of all,
we may want to select a different
texture for our streaks.
Unreal II has a very nice list
of all the
different textures you can choose
and it is in
ParticleSystems.
As you can see, the list is is just
huge.
Since we want streaks, we will select Streaks
and
there aren't many options,
so let's just select Streak01.
It's already selected, so that's okay with me.
Then
we can select all these different properties,
you're free to actually
try them out.
This program doesn't really crash so often;
if you do something really stupid then it will crash
but usually it just turns off
the entire ParticleTemplate
and resumes
operation once you
actually
change all the invalid
options that you have chosen.
Now let's see.
You can change the colours but I do not think that you need to do so...
Now ParticleTemplate:
you'll want to
change the InitialSpeed and LifeSpan of this.
Let's say the speed is 100
and yes, as you can see,
we already got
ourselves a very nice
emitter
which gives us some nice
streaks
which look a lot like
sparks.
As you can see, these streaks are white.
They're white because we didn't choose any colour in here.
So let's choose a colour.
This time
you'll see
a button "Add"
and you can add a colour.
As you can see,
this made everything disappear because it's black.
you'll
actually want to use this
"..." button
and
it lets you select it.
I want a nice blue particle
like this.
As you can see, it
now gives us this
very nice effect that is very similar to what we saw on the Drakk Homeworld.
Now you can change the length -
as you can see,
A and B -
these mean that this a sort of maximum and minimum
but it doesn't really matter where is maximum and where is minimum.
This makes this
particle engine very convenient.
So if we change it to 5
we'll have
a lot of small
particles.
Okay.
Turn it back to 10,
and as you can see we already have
very nice particles,
but we can
have better.
As you can see, they just disappear.
So what can we do
so it fades out nicely?
Well first of all
I want to change
the initial LifeSpan
to something
longer, such as 3.
You can see that it
goes nearly all the way around the world.
Now
also one thing that you are should note is Extents.
You cannot open it.
But what is very important is that
if you see
any kind of extents
like, X is not 0, Y is not 0 and such
and at the and of this
it says IsValid=1, it means that
it is valid,
the
ParticleTemplate is valid and it should show something.
If it's not not valid, it won't show anything
and you will know that you have
made some kind of a mistake in creating it.