Particle Effects in Godot 4.0 Beta

lately I've been testing the cutoff for beta releases and I decided to test out the new features for particle systems particles work mostly as stated in Coda 3.5 so even if you are using rl3 you can still pick up some things from this video just a few new features are available and some settings may be in different places in this video I'm going to show you a few effects I came up with and share some tips on how I make particle effects it's going to be a bit different than the previous tutorial videos but I hope you find this helpful nonetheless let's get to it beautiful to give a short introduction to particles in godo4 the note you will be working with for the most part is TPU particles 3D in ghetto 3 this node is just called particles there is also a CPU version of this note that supports less features and is meant for platforms for GPU particles are not well supported when using TPU particles 3D there are four main parts you will be working with first the settings on the particle node itself with these settings you can change the amount emitted timing related settings drawing trails and some other basic settings second the particle process material this is a Shader that defines how the particles behave where they spawn how they move rotate and scale it also manages the color of the particles during their lifetime you can use the built-in particle process material or create your own custom Shader third the door passes these Define what the rendered mesh of the particle is you can have any mesh as the particle a cube a sphere or a custom model for the most part you'll be using a quad mesh for billboard particles or the new tube Trail mesh and Ribbon Trail mesh for trail particles fourth the particle rendering material this is the material for the mesh in the draw pass you can put this material in the mesh material slot or just use the material override you can decide what texture to use how the alpha and blending work and the billboard settings here the first effect I'm going to show you is this fire I made it consists of the fire itself some Embers and smoke it also contains an omni light to cast light on the scene let's look at the fire itself to get an idea how I played with the settings to create the effect starting with the process material I'm using the gravity setting to move the particles upward I'm giving the particle some angular velocity which makes the particles rotate and random initial angle which makes it harder to see that every particle is using the same identical texture I also randomized the scale of every particle and scale the particles over their lifetime using a curve the Min and max value Define the range of a random value that is picked for each particle for the color ramp I'm using this gradient which changes the particles color from a bright orange to a darker orange and also Fades the alpha over their lifetime I have set the color to values that are greater than one this color multiplies the Color Run value to make the firewatch brighter lasting for the process material is using turbulence to add some natural variation to the movement of the particles for the draw pass I'm using a basic quad mesh for the material I'm using this Albedo texture I'm using the alpha of the texture for the transparency most of the time you'll be using either a texture with an alpha Channel like this or a texture with a black background and using the blend mode add like I'm doing for the Amber particles I have the shading set to unshaded since the fire itself is emissive it can get away with not being affected by lighting at all it's important to turn on use as Albedo under the vertex color tab to make sure the color settings in the process material affect the material's color I've also set the billboard mode to particle billboard to make use of the scale and rotation features along with just making the mesh behave as a billboard that always faces the camera I'm also making use of the proximity fade feature to make the particles blend into the ground without a hard Edge that pretty much covers the basics for this particle effect the embarrassing smoke are just slightly altered using the same basic parameters to complete the effect one last thing to briefly mention is the draw order of the particles which I've set the different values for the fire and smoke I'm also using the rendered priority to manage the particles to draw in the order i1 with the smoke being in the background and the fire in front while working with the particles I sometimes encountered issues with the particles to stop emitting restarting the project usually fix this the next effect we are going to look at is this Ray starting with the Raindrop particles the meshes are quad measures with the basic texture made using gradient texture 2D in the process material instead of using gravity which would make sense here I'm using the direction and initial velocity settings to give the raindrops their full speed as they are emitted the emission shape is a wide and long box shape I've also set the Transformer line to rotate the raindrops in the direction of their velocity the important part of this effect is the collisions I have a particle collision Box near the ground surface I tried using the height field Collision but I got more consistent collisions and more control using the Collision box to use the collisions I have the raindrops Collision mode set to hide on contact to emit the Ripple particles I have the sub emulator mode set to add a collision and the Ripple particle system is the sub emitter in the particle settings of the raindrops there is no way to have multiple sub emitters so I'm just using the collisions of the Ripple particles to emit the little splash particles this is not ideal since I'd want the splash to emit all at once hopefully in the future an option to emit sub-emitters particles at the beginning of the main particles will be added that's pretty much it for the rain effect I'm just quickly showing you the Ripple and splash particle settings here just in case you are interested the last effect I want to break down is this artistic black hole effect you can see that it's made from numerous parts the main bright beams are using Ribbon Trail meshes to use the trails feature in addition to using one of the trail meshes you need to turn on use particle trails in the rendering materials transform settings and enable trails in the particle node settings to make the particles orbit around the center I'm using tangential acceleration to make them rotate around and then a negative radial acceleration and some damping to pull them closer the Dark Cloud particles and the Sparks work much in the same way just with lower values for a slower speed these particles just use billboard quad meshes for the glowing core I'm using a sphere mesh mesh instance with a simple visual Shader that makes use of the fresnel node and a gradient texture I've also made this other mesh instance that adds a bit of glow to the center it also has a visual Shader for the glow gradient texture adjusted by a curve and the vertex Shader utilizing a billboard Matrix to make it face the camera I also make use of a negative light to add a bit of contrast to the center of the black hole you can see that more complex effects can be achieved by simply stacking multiple particle systems and even measures with creative shaders to get a better idea of how my effect creation process goes I recorded a time lapse of me creating this magic light effect I started off with a bright glowing star I had to do some troubleshooting to get the particle rotations working smoothly as there was some strange issue with it once I got the star working I moved on to the floating orbs these orbs make heavy use of turbulent noise further movements I also added some beams using Trail particles these beams orbit around the center I also have some issues with the trail rendering that I had to troubleshoot here finally I did some adjustments to the size emission amounts and settings I set local coordinates on for the star so that it sticks in place even if I move the node I also added light to the effect and here's the result animating at the normal speed all the textures I used for these particle effects were made using material maker this procedural texture generation tool is perfect for making particle Sprites which usually are simple and often based on some type of noise that's it for this video I'm trying to have some variety with the content and make some game art focused videos as well hope you found these breakdowns useful and if you have any questions let me know in the comments please like the video and subscribe to support us in making more content like this and thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: GameDev Compass

Views: 24,122

Keywords: game development, gamedev, godot, godot engine, movement, tutorial, beginner, godot 4

Id: nDfthvG3Cyo

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2022