Haunted House Project - Particles

 Particles

    In terms of particles - I wanted to have two types of particle systems in my 3D Haunted House environment scene. So once I was done making some of the materials and applying some of the textures, I decided to focus on making those particle systems in order to start building up the atmosphere further. 

    The very first particle system that I created was dust. In order to create it, I used Niagara which was something that I had never used before. However, I wanted to familiarise myself with it because I had seen other people in tutorials use it and it seemed quite useful to me. Dev Enabled is a channel on YouTube that I really like and I tend to watch it quite a lot for tutorials and things like that - Dev Enabled - YouTube. His videos has helped me out a great deal.

    In order to make my dust particle system, I started out by initialising the lifetime and the spawn rate.

    I do that first and before anything else because I think it's important for me to get the rate in which the dust will spawn and scatter across the environment I place it in first, then test it out in order to see how much space it's going to fill up - and then move onto setting up things such as the scale and the exact colour. 

    What I did next was go to box location and change all three box sizes slots in order to set up the correct scale that I wanted, of how far I want my dust particles to go. And velocity in order to align the direction in which my particles were moving, which is something that I had to look up because I wasn't sure about.

    

Result

    Once I was done making the dust particles, I made fire using a normal particle system. That one was a lot easier to make because I was already familiar with the normal particle system from last year.

    Similarly to the dust particles, I started out by initialising the spawn and the lifetime. When it comes to the lifetime, I tend to use Distribution Float Uniform for distribution. The reason for that, I've learned, is because float distributions are the ones usually used when there's a lifetime of a particle, or spawn rate of emitter.

       

    In addition to that, I set the SubUV and the colour over life. The latter is what determines the colour of the fire, and for that I looked at some reference images on the internet – I made the fire redder at the bottom, where it's rising from and yellow towards the edge of the flames where they're almost evaporating.

    Here are some of the screenshots that I took of the end result.