Dissolving Particles with Custom Vertex Streams

by Devon O.· February 03, 2019· in Shaders, Unity3D· 0 comments tags: particles
Here’s a quick little tip/idea to demonstrate using custom vertex streams and custom data in your Unity3D Particle Systems to create some pretty interesting VFX such as dissolving particles. Doing some googling, there didn’t seem to be a lot of information out there about custom data in particle systems, so hopefully this will help out a little. From a high level, what this entails is creating a particle system that will automatically send some data to the shader of the particle material via the shader’s vertex stream. So, as you might guess, the first thing we’ll need is a shader that will be able to handle the data sent. Even sooner, though, let’s get a couple textures together. For the particle we can just use a basic particle png that has a radial gradient that goes from white in the center to full full alpha along the outer edge. We’ll also need a dissolve texture, which in this case can just be some quick perlin noise. You can make both in Photoshop or Gimp in about 5 minutes or just nab them here if you’d like to just try this out quickly. Of course, since the effect we’ll be looking […]
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Animated Particles, Books, and Code – It’s a New Year

by Devon O.· January 01, 2014· in Actionscript, Flash, Life· 3 comments tags: particles, starling
2014 It doesn’t even sound real. Like an unreachable year in an 80’s sci-fi b movie. And yet, for better or worse, here we are. Seems my last post was quite some time ago (I think WordPress has had 16 releases since then) and a bit negative (bug report), so it’s time to start the new year off right. Animated Particles First on the agenda is something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile, but just never got the time until this Christmas/New Year’s holiday. Now, I really love the Starling particle extension. I mean, hell, who doesn’t love particles? But I always thought it would be nice if the particles could be animated (think flocks of flying birds or schools of swimming fish), so I sat down and added the possibility. First, the downside. I was hoping I could simply extend the current Starling particle extension and tweak it a bit. In theory this would be possible. Unfortunately, in practice, the properties and methods that needed tweaking were private class members. So, unfortunately, I had to basically duplicate a good deal of the code. First I just copied ParticleSystem.as into a new class named OpenParticleSystem and set the private […]
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Devon O. Wolfgang

AIR | Unity3D | AR/VR

Unity Certified Developer

Technical Reviewer of “The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development” and “Starling Game Development Essentials”

Reviewer of “The Starling Handbook”

Unity Engineer at Touch Press.

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