An Intro to Godot 4 Particles + Godot Future Development Update

hello ladies and gentlemen Mike here at game from scratch welcome to a gdau engine twofer what we're going to do is two things first off we're going to have an introductory tutorial to using particles in gdau 4 and Beyond and speaking of and Beyond we're also going to get into a news post about the new features in particle systems with gdau 4.2 beta and some of the things worked on in the future so if you using gdau particles you may find this interesting now things changed a whole lot between gdau 3 and gdau 4 so you have no idea how to use particles in gdau hopefully this will help you first thing we're going to do is create a 3D scene there are particle systems for 2D and 3D they have basically identical naming conventions we're going to focus on the 3D aspects today so first thing we need to do is create our particle systems you're going to notice if you type in the word particle you have two options under 3D you have CPU particles and GPU particles now the big thing in the news we're going to get back to this in the details in a minute uh CPU particles are basically being let's not say retired but um deemphasized so you're going to mostly work with GPU particles going forward and GPU particles just got a major rewrite again if you're from gdau 3.x using particles in gdau 4 is not going to be immediate obviously how it works because they are greatly refactored so you're going to notice here after you created your particle system you've got an error here you need to have a draw process and a material so that's the first things we're going to do first let's do the draw process this is pretty straightforward this is the particle to draw if you do not understand what a particle system is basically it is like a controller for a whole bunch of meshes and basically that's that's as simple as it gets so you could use things like a simple point in space and then add some color to it to create a smoke effect or you can put um you know 3D objects into the world and create like a flamethrower so it's basically normally used for uh special effects but can also be used for things like flocking behavior for doing birds and so on stuff like that so simple thing here so let go ahead and create capsule so there you see it will create a number of capsules over time uh but what I'm going to do instead is a quad this is a very common thing basically is like just a flat surface with a texture on it so we'll go ahead and do that too so this is this is probably the most common way of using particle systems create a material and then what we're going to do is go to the Elbo channel of that material and of course this guy is here so we're going to use AR gadoo image as the texture so there you can see there is our single particle not that exciting so far uh so what we would normally do is actually uh create a process material so this is where the the heart of the particle system is create a new particle process material like so and then boom there you see we have our particles right now we are creating eight particles like this and they're going to last for 1 second so during this lifespan of 1 second we created a total of eight particles so for example you could come down here and say make this last for two seconds like so and what you're going to notice is you create them slower and they go over a longer period of time at the same time I could come up here and say okay I'm going to create 26 particles and now we have it stretched down there now the interesting thing is we now have this guy here this is one of the new additions uh we'll get back to the additions in just a minute but I'm going to show you now what you can do is actually control the rate at which the particles are actually created and you can control this over time so existing particles the guys that are already spun down there so look at the bottom of this guy they're not going to be affected but here you're going to have a slower rate from that point on so if you had like a water hose or something you wanted to control the rate that it was blowing out at amount ratio is going to be a big new addition so this is an example of one of the new features in this particular release there's a bunch more we'll get back to them in just a sec but first I want to again focus on the specifics of the particles system so there you go uh our particles are basically we're creating 26 particles over a period of 2 seconds another new feature here is we have this interpolation that was added no idea how that works to be honest and all the other additions are in the uh particle process material now another thing to be aware of with this is they just completely refactored in uh this is uh this is gdau 4.2 beta so if you find particle systems don't work the way you expected there was a huge update here so uh there might be some bugs or issues or whatever so here we are we're going to control over how our particles are spawn now you would normally do that with something like velocity so instead of going uh let's change this one down to Z and we'll change this one up on the Y AIS so now we've got these particles basically being spawned in the direction of up now the problem here is we have down grabbing it at 9.8 m/s so that is not ideal we've got gravity being done here so what we need to do is give it a little bit of velocity so there you see now we are going up so our initial velocity is being factored in here uh We've also got control over the maximum velocity so we can vary how each particle is done let's go up here and change it up to like 500 particles so we got a bunch of them going on you see they're all going up by the way you can combine them to a single axis if you so wish to do so it's another property in here so if you want to just uh align them so that they only stay along the y axis that is a controllable thing uh you can do here and I don't know why my particle system is off base you can control can they rotate you can have it so they only stay so yeah there Z only is one particular option you've got there so you got a lot of particle control flags that you can control exactly how these systems are created uh obviously spawning Point how the initial they go in the place you can have them uh do acceleration over time you can have turbulence and so on another thing we can obviously control uh we have the explosiveness so the amount of particles that come out right off the Hop so let's have boom so this is going to create a lot of our particles right away or we can have it basically just create all of our particles like so if you've got an explosion you set the explosiveness up really high of course that makes a lot of sense as well uh one other thing I'm going to do I'm just going to jack down the amount that they're spreading out by 45% 45 degree angle is a little higher than I wish now of course we're only scratching the surface of what particle systems are capable of here there is so much more we could potentially do so for example let's just turn this down a little bit like so uh we could actually that's way too high let's do 20 there all right so we could do things like collisions I could turn collisions on let's turn collisions into rigid body here let's go over here and we're going to add a collider so GPU particle collider Collision box 3D like so and then we can actually have this guy that the particles will then bounce off of s so you can create these colliders in the world that interact with particle systems uh we can do other interesting things here you're going to notice it's basically in general for particle systems uh you do have things like a tractor so I can have it so that it sucks track sucks them in like a vacuum cleaner here we can have them being manipulated and spun around in the world you can actually even have particles interact with 3D objects in the scene now as well which is pretty cool so that's kind of the the basic introduction to particle system so you can see here if you wanted to create a water fountain you could do it and then here you can control other things there's so many control points that we didn't talk about here so you can control uh the the transparency over time the the lighting of things how to actually uh render this thing over time we can have it uh again we can could have it scale the particles over time or over the velocity or whatever so we can also vary the size of our particles so some of them are small some of them are huge so you've got you got control over all kinds of variations with things again you could also change the color curve over time uh like this in here uh and a lot of these things will basically be controlled by curve ramps Etc uh but now that is it for the basics of controlling particle systems but there is a ton you could do simple water fountain effect being generated here using the gdau logos and a single Collision box uh so let's go now take a look at what's new in in the future of particles in gdo 4 starting at gdau 4.2 beta so if you head on over to gdo engine. org there is this new article basically progress report on gdau particles and there's some pretty major news here so the first thing we've got here is major changes to uh the GPU particle system and then CPU particle system now this one is key we'll get back to it in just a second but basically CPU particles are being frozen in time they're not going to be doing a lot more they're not going to get feature parody with GPU particles so this is the first update where GPU particles is getting a bunch of new features so you can see some examples of what you can do with it uh that are not going to be ported over to CPU particles we'll get to the reasons for that in just a second but the entire GPU particle system was completely Rewritten so it should be a 100% backward compatibility uh it might look a little bit different there's if your particle systems don't work the same uh they're asking you to fill a bug report for it so hopefully this new rewrite cleanup of the code which will make it easier to add new features to the particle systems in the future didn't break too much of what exists right now but we don't really know so we got another number of additions now once again I talked about GPU particles 3D in my little tutorial section uh it's just as applicable for particles 2D by the way so uh we did get those two new features in GPU particles 3D the amount ratio and the interpolation to the end amount ratio again is for controlling the amount of particles emitted over time uh my example was like a a fire hose that has a varying speed that's how you would use that feature uh interpolation to the end interpolates our particle from the same node simultaneous toward the end of their lifetime I'm not 100% certain what the use case of that is to be honest and then we got a bunch of changes in the particle processed material now particle processed material is the heart of the particle system as we saw this is where you control things like velocity spread particle size over time color and so on we've got a bunch of new featur such as dampening as friction uh we got changes to emissions so you've got a new offset functionality a new scale option and inherit velocity ratio for your mitter there emissions value uh and then velocity got a number of new features as well including a velocity Pivot Point directional velocity using an XYZ curve uh orbit velocity radial velocity limit velocity limit and scale over velocity a curve that allows you to scale particles on a given axis so there are some more details of them here you can see some of the examples in action of the new particle systems available out there and then the big thing here is CPU part articles is basically being sheld it's being put on so it's still going to be in there it's just not being updated so it was maintained along siiz GPU particles for a long time it's getting harder and harder to keep them at feature parody especially with the big changes they just made so CPU particles were added back in ges2 render back in uh gdau 3 for supporting older machines uh gdo 4 has Vulcan and GES ES3 renders both of which support GPU particles so um the the CPU particles were added for an old render the GLE S2 renderer for running on holder Hardware all the modern renderers now uh the so Vulcan and G3 both support GPU particles so keeping up the CPU particles thing just isn't worth it anymore uh so it's going to keep happening um it's just it it's used to be basically a fallback option but now what you're going to see is going forward the CPU particles aren't going to get the updates that GPU particles do uh but to help of the migration there is a converter for CPU particles to GPU particles uh so if you've got a CPU particle system in it you can actually rightclick it and then say convert to uh GPU particles and it should take care of that for you so basically this is about supporting uh older render older Hardware uh so it was a fallback render you were always preferred to use the GPU particle system if it worked for you uh but CPU would work for like older devices and older again gle2 renderer uh so going forward they're not adding feature parod so when they add something new to GPU particles it doesn't get added to the CPU particles so CPU particles is effectively a deadend brand at this point in time no new features none of the new stuff we talked about today all of these various different things we talked about like these things they are not being added to the CPU particle code I I think it's a fair thing I um but I'm not using these so I'm curious if you're using this will this have an impact on you going forward let me know that in the comments down below uh another interesting thing here uh there are some details on the future developments other things that they are working towards and what you should do really is check out the VFX and Tech art wish list and so this is a rundown of proposed things and so on now the funniest thing here is you have CPU particle updates I got a feeling that one's going to be asked because that's one of those things that they're basically just described as happening but this is other things that they are looking at adding in the future or or are working towards or where they are currently at in the status the importance of it Etc so if you're wondering what they're looking at adding new features in the world of VFX and particle systems this is available I'll have this linked with the other article down below uh so check that out also if you're looking for a bit more of like I showed you the basics of how to use particle systems I didn't really actually show you how to use them well well now you know the basis a great place to start is actually from this guy so the guy that created this particular effect right here uh has actually got a website so you can see a number of different uh V effects that he's done so there is the the effect that we saw in action right there what I would recommend is actually checking out this video it's a good tutorial on how he does his VFX uh inside so how he actually creates the particle systems now you need to know how to use particle systems but from the first half of this video we should have you covered great video so definitely check this one out I will have this particular video link down below and you can see some examples of particle systems that he's created uh and the capabilities of them uh available down here so he's a great great particle system work and he has this excellent tutorial basically breaks down how he did this explosion tutorial using the particle system from Gau 4.x I will have this linked down below as well so with what you learned earlier on in this video and his work you should be able to make some pretty cool stuff and it's a short video uh so let me know what you think of the changes to uh particles in gdau the dropping of future support for CPU particles now they're going to stay around they're just not going to get new features and yeah that's it uh and did you use particles in gdau 3 and do you find the new good fourway better or worse more confusing more powerful let me know that in the comments down below as well and I will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 25,335

Keywords: Godot, Godot engine, Godot particles, Godot particles tutorial, godot particles 3d, godot 4 tutorial, godot 4.2, GPUparticles3d, CPUparticles3D, gamedev, game development, gamefromscratch, godot engine, godot 4, godot 4.0, godot beta, godot roadmap

Id: dGnbaOp9X8M

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 24 2023