Godot 3D Particles Introduction | Arcane Bolt | Godot Particles Series #1

in this goda tutorial we're going to take a look at 3d particles through the lens of creating an arcane bolt this tutorial is not specifically for how to make an arcane bolt but functions more as an introductionary episode into 3d particles that i'll probably be doing a series of let's get started so this is what we'll be making today let's quickly go over it and then reproduce we got an arcane bolt which is a rigid body so that it can interact with the physics world we got a coalition shape to support our rigid body and we got two particle effects one for the bolt of the arcane bolt and one for the sparks that appear to come out of it now let's make a new scene and reproduce this making a new scene will be a 3d scene will give us a spatial and i'm immediately going to change that type into a rigid body that rigid body needs to be renamed because we want this to be an arcane bolt and i'll call it number two because well already got the scene arcane bolt with that done we of course have to add a new child that is going to be a collision shape that coalition shape is going to be a sphere and clicking into the sphere shape i'm going to set the radius to 0.33 as that will be big enough for the physics detection of our arcane bolt with this done we now need some particles so i'm going to show you where to find those i'm going to keep it nice and easy for you candy.nel has so kindly provided us with a cc01 no attribution required free to use commercially particle pack so download this pack it will come with two types of particle sets one with a black background and one with a transparent background and we want to be using the transparent ones now make sure you unzip that and put the transparent particles into your project folder i've put them here on the assets particles and here is where all the particles of that pack currently are with our pack in godot let's now make the first particle i'm going to add a new child to my arcane ball 2 and that is going to be a particles node now the particles node comes with a wide variety of various options that you can choose from and it's quite intimidating at first as this is an introductionary video into 3d particles i'm going to go over the various options with a little bit more detail and a little bit more depth in future tutorials in this series we'll pick up that pace with particles selected the first two things we want to set is the process material and the draw passes for the process material you can go for a shaded material meaning you're going to code everything yourself that gives you much more options but also a much steeper learning curve we're going to go with the particles material meaning that we're going to make use of the options that gold provides out of the box with particles material selected when you click into here you can see a lot of options we're going to go over those in a moment first though we're going to set the draw passes we got to set pass number one and here we've got to select what kind of a particle or the shape of the particle that we want we're going to provide rectangular textures or square textures not sure what they are but we're going to need a quad mesh for that and the moment you select that you can already see that we got something on the screen we got particles being emitted we're currently emitting eight particles per second and those particles have a lifetime of one second if i were to lower this you can see that we're now we're emitting less seconds and obviously the emitting function right here turns things on and off now before we go any further into any of these options i want to set up the geometry with the particles that were provided by kenny to do that i'm going to go into my geometry and we're going to have to set up the material override again you can provide a shaded material coding everything yourself steeper learning curve or you can choose a spatial material which is going to make use of the various options that coda provides out of the box clicking into the material override there's again many options and we're going to go over only a couple of them in this episode before as far as we are going to be needing them the first thing i want to set up is the flags i've told you to use the transparent background images from the particle set of kenny l and with that transparency channel available to us we got to make sure that it's activated so we got to set transparent arm here otherwise we don't make use of that transparency channel we also want them to be unshaded so that the environment doesn't change how the effect looks when i turn this on you can see that the particles are turning white that's because the blue light from the default environment no longer shades the particles anymore now with that said these are the settings we need for flags under vertex color i'm going to select use as albedo this will allow us to use more coloring options in the particles material we'll get into a little bit later it will allow us to set a gradient which is going to make this arcane bolt look much cooler that's it for vertex color on the parameters we got to set the blend mode from mix to add this will make sure that the colors and the particles are not mixing but they're adding on top of each other reinforcing each other making the effect more intense where there is more particles overlapping for the billboard mode that's the second option here we want to turn this from disabled into particle billboard if i were to pan around with disabled you can see that we can look at this particle from various angles and we can even well not look at the back because the back is not drawn you want this particle to have a 3d view so we're going to turn vertical billboard on now the particle will always face the camera in that way we can make sure that we have a 3d looking effect with only 2d planes okay that's it for parameters now we can switch to the albedo options and this is where we're going to be adding that particle now this is of course all the particles we have and sometimes you don't really know which particles you needed to have anymore because well the icons here can be quite small what you can do you can quickly switch to the 2d scene and then you can drag these particles here i'm just dragging i'm holding my mouse button and you can quickly have a look at how these various particles look they're like oh yeah yeah i needed i needed this one okay and then you just drag it over the texture go back to 3d and as you can see now we're emitting this it's not like you have to do that you can also just drag it right here that 2d is just a quick tip if you want to know how that particle looks without having to go into the file manager opening up the texture itself all right with that said we're now pretty much done with the material we're not going to make use of this coloring option here as i said we have used the vertex color used as albedo option we've turned that on so we can make use of more advanced coloring options under the particle material we'll get there in a moment now we can close this up so i'm going to close these options up with the back button here in the top we go back to the inspector of the particle node we don't need geometry anymore we can now go into our process material we can click into particle material and in here we can use all these options to set the various elements and the behavior of this particle there is no particular order with which you have to go through all these options the best thing that you can do is to first determine the big leaps you can take from taking the particle where it is now to where you want the particle to be or to look like one of the biggest differences between the particle i currently got and the arcane ball i'm trying to create is that the particles are experiencing gravity and the arcane bolt needs to be floating so one of the big leaps that i can make this particle look so much more to what i want it to be is to turn the gravity off now we have an almost static looking particle actually it looks static that's because four particles are emitted per second at exactly the same location in exactly the same way the next big thing i can do is to add randomness to start creating the illusion of a ball i can do that with the angle option right here this is the angle with which the particle is spawned into the world or in other words the rotation the angle with which it comes i can set the angle to be up to 360 degrees and the randomness i can set between 0 and 1 0 being no randomness 1 being maximum randomness when i set that we can already see that the particle starts to look a little bit like the arcane bolt that we're trying to create the next big leap to get our particle to look like an arcane bolt is to actually make it look like a ball instead of some randomly drawn particles we can do so by increasing the number of particles that we emit however note how dynamic the particle looks now and how dynamic or how much dynamic loss we experience when we increase the number of particles right now it starts to look more like a sun instead of a living energy being magically summoned somewhere we can bring some of that randomness back by introducing some randomness to the position where the particle spawns we've so far only introduced randomness in the angle of the particle not in its spawn location we're going to change the emission shape from point to a sphere as you'll see now the particle emits on a sphere increasing amount of randomness in its location however it is of course way too much so we're going to reduce the sphere size to 0.08 that still gives us a ball but gives it a lot more dynamic feeling along the edge of the ball it's still not perfect though because right now our spikes on the ball if i may call them like that are appearing and disappearing out of nowhere that's because these particles are emitted as such we can change that using the scaling options i'm going to close my emission option scroll down to scale i'm first going to make the ball a little bit bigger 1.2 seems like a good size then i'm going to add a skill curve with a new curved texture i'm going to click into the curve texture and here we can determine the skill of every single particle during its lifetime so we can say that the particle needs to come into the world a little bit smaller for example 0.75 about there now you can immediately see the particle changes effect quite drastically no longer do we have the spikes at the edge of the ball appearing out of nowhere now it seems like there's an energy coming from within however the spikes are still disappearing so we need to bring the back of the edge down as well but it needs to be the full size in the middle so we're gonna add two points to the skill curve i'm gonna bring these two up say that they can be up to a hundred percent and we want them to be up to a hundred percent for a small period of time at the edge then we can bring the last or the the end of the lifetime of the particles down and now it looks like actually it is like the particles are growing during their lifetime and just over the half of their lifetime they're gonna shrink back down and as there are enough particles in this bowl you don't actually see the particles appear and disappear anymore if i were to reduce the amount quickly to 4 you can see how this effect works or how the skill texture works and you can see by increasing the amount of particles we emit we can give the illusion of a ball having a very dynamic energy inside of it to increase that dynamic feeling of the arcane bolt even more we can also introduce some angular velocity that's the velocity with which a particle rotates we are going to close the scaling option and an angular velocity i've set the velocity not too high a nice 15 would do as you can see the ball currently rotates in one movement or one direction by adding a full randomness to the mix we now have the particles individually from each other take various velocities in both directions creating even more bustling energy inside this arcane bolt then lastly the fun part coloring these particles we're gonna do that with the color options you have we have right here and these are available to us are always available to us but they work for us because we set that one particular flag in the material within the geometry so if you change these options but it doesn't seem to appear on the particle make sure you set that flag that i showed you earlier in this tutorial we're not going to make use of the normal color because we want this to look a little more special so we're going to go with a new gradient color i'm going to open up and i'm going to say new gradients open that one up and here we got well the gradient options available to us i'm going to add a flag in the middle for sure and let's start with that one i want to set that one to a little bit of a pinky color then the ends i want to set to a pretty similar pinky color and the ends we're going to set into a darker purple color a little bit like that now we're going to shift this around a little bit and change the colors until we have an effect that we like in my case i've prepared this a little bit i want a little bit more purple to start out with creating this sort of dark purpley arrow area area in the middle there then i'm going to take the middle one and i'm not going to say that it needs to take a pure color but i'm going to give it a little bit of white thereby we get this sort of a white circular energy in the middle of the of the particle emitter and that looks like the amount of white that i'm looking for now this looks pretty good already for an arcane bulb but we want some more cool stuff to happen with the arcane ball that i show you you can see that i've also got these energy sparks emitting from the ball and these energy sparks are set up in such a way that when this spell is fired the sparks are going to create a trill behind the arcane bolt and that is of course a pretty cool effect to have in your game so now we're gonna work on those sparks i'm gonna go back to the arcane ball we're working on and let's immediately rename this to the bolt so we can set these two apart add a new child and we're going to add a new particles we'll immediately rename this one to sparks now i'm going to go over this one a little bit faster than the previous one so you can see how we do things with sparks we are going to go into our process material set new particles material in our draw passes we're going to go for a quad mesh i'm going to set the amount to 4 and i'm going to be hiding the bolt so that one doesn't interfere with what we're currently working on in geometry gonna set a new spatial material click into it flags transparent and unshaded vertex color uses albedo parameters blend mode to add and the billboard mode to particle billboard in our albedo we'll have to find the right texture i think yeah i think it's sparks4 so we're gonna drag that to the texture that done we can close this one up go back and we're gonna go back into our process material where we're going to set up the particle material first again we need to make sure that we don't have any gravity and for the angle we're going to do the same we're going to say that you're going to have a random angle to your particle now from here things are going to get a little bit different not too much so let's slow down a little bit and i'll show you some other options especially linear velocity which is going to be pretty important for this particle when you're working with particles and velocity it's always a good thing to first consider the lifetime of the particle because if you're tweaking the velocity to make sure that that particle ends up at a certain place you might change that destination when you have changed the life of the particle later on so in my case i think a good lifestyle for these spark effects has gone 2.3 seconds of course i've tested that before and know that beforehand normally there's quite a lot of experimenting in that in there we're going to set the initial velocity of this particle to 0.6 and we're going to set some randomness to that velocity as well not full randomness we at least want to have some velocity there so we'll put that randomness at 0.4 now you can see these particles are only being emitted in one direction and we can change that obviously in the direction parameters we're going to set the spread to full which is then 180. the particles are now being emitted but there are meat being emitted at a fixed ratio which is good but maybe these particles as they going further and further away from the origin the energy ball that emits them maybe you want these particles to slow down as they are going to lose their velocity so in the linear acceleration i'm actually going to be setting a negative value and this case already experimented with it of 0.18 that will make these particles slow down as they go out of this bowl now of course this acceleration is carefully considered with the lifetime to make sure that the particles never return to the bowl as that would give quite a weird effect so with this done we have now particles being emitted at random locations in random directions with a deacceleration now two last options will first make the sparks a little bit bigger again using skill i'm not going to go with a fixed skill so no scaling textures required this time and lastly we want to make sure as i said before that these sparks are going to form a trill behind the arcane bolt as it's being shot out to do that we're going to go to our drawing options we haven't been here before and we're going to turn off a local coordinates that will make sure they start using the global coordinates which will make sure that as the bulb the rigid body travels these sparks are going to stay in their global location while the ball travels further into the world now with this done all we got to do is set the color for the color we are again going to go with the same color scheme as the arcane balls that will be purplish pink we're going to go for a new gradient texture we'll set a new gradient and we'll select the first option here we'll make that again a darker purple we'll go to the first option which will make a kind of bright purple and we'll add an option in the middle here that is going to be a bright purple as well with a little bit of white in there not too much now as you can see these textures are currently disappearing as they reach the end of their lifetime making it a little bit weird we can change that by setting the transparency of this particle we're going to go to the first gradient option here i'm going to set the transparency to start at 180. then we're going to go to the middle one set this one to a transparency of 90 and we'll go to the last one setting the transparency to zero now you'll see that the particles are slowly disappearing as they reach the end of their lifetime sort of as if they are being evaporated into the air now all we got to do is combine these effects together so i'll turn the bolt on again and as you can see we now have these sparks coming out of this bowl left and right but there's not too many so let's up it a little bit and i believe we are using about 24 of them and now you can see that this arcane ball looks like it's a lot of energy radiating from it and as energy radiates from it some of that energy appears to escape through these sparks now that looks pretty cool now of course you want to see how the trailing effect is actually looking and for that i've prepared a little bit of a scene so now when i play the game and i got that scene ready for us that scene makes use of some code that was already on the first arcane board got a little bit of a mage here i got a fire command coated on the my first mouse button my left mouse button and now i can fire this arcane bolt and you can see how that trailing effect works as we fire this spell into the world i'm pretty happy with that hope you are too that was it for today guys i hope you liked this video and i'm really curious to hear your opinion because this is the first 3d tutorial i've done on the channel in almost one and a half year now 3d is not weird for me soul whisperer the game i developed myself is a 3d game i just never gotten around making 3d tutorials so curious to hear your opinion what do you want to hear more what kind of particles would you like to see leave a comment down below if you like this video then please smash that like button hit subscribe don't forget that little bell icon to make sure that you don't miss out on the next tutorial i hope to see you then and until then keep on gaming keep on coding see you later guys

Channel: Game Development Center

Views: 4,416

Keywords: godot 3d particles, godot 3d particles tutorial, godot particles 3d, godot particles 3d tutorial, godot introduction to particles, godot beginner tutorial particles, godot spell effects, godot magic effects, godot beginner Tutorial, godot tutorial, godot

Id: DkJ2jYl-ESw

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021