By the way, my request is solved with this since I can set the frame rate to 0 and use the random property to achieve the above. Thanks for that!
However, given that you had to make the API so bespoke and particular to deal with all of the limitations, and the fact that all these limitations are imposed on us, I don’t really understand why it couldn’t have waited for a more generic release. I really don’t like the inflexibility on the number of frames and the image size. I think there was time (given limited number of feature requests for this) to work a bit more on this before releasing it.
Also, none of these new APIs are non-scriptable it seems, so you have to support these forever since code might be invoking them.
I think a better way to release this feature would have been to wait until arbitrary image and flipbook sizes could be supported, so that the API didn’t have to be as bespoke and particular as it is currently. The rest of the limitations you point out are all supplementary and don’t affect the direct API.
Regardless, thanks for putting work into this! This is a good step forward for particles.
This update is great, I hope this is the beginning of more spritesheet support on many other features. A single image is way more efficient than multiple, and things like spritesheet textures for meshes/decals would allow for a whole new world of animated effects and textures.
Also one thing, this could already be accomplished with billboards and image labels, and those are still way more customizable. Will particles eventually be a better option?
I am curious about performance though, are these particularly intensive @JaapSuter? If so in what ways? I want to figure out how sparingly/heavily I can use these.
As others have pointed out the requirement of being 1024x1024 can impact memory, though that is not too much of a concern for me as I am looking to use the same few textures on many particle emitters, rather than many unique textures.
Wow, this is such a great update, can’t wait for it to be out completely! This will add quite a bit more flair to our particle effects, and I look forward to playing around with it in studio!
Hello, are particles planned to ever be removed? I see this as a replacement for them, and I’ll be quite sad if particles are removed in the future because I mainly use them for VFX.
Unreal Engine and Unity have special modules/settings for this that you can enable.
When enabled they’ll treat particles like tiny spheres that can bounce or roll around, their collision and physics are pretty cheap and can easily simulate thousands of them at a time (they’re likely GPU simulated).
A additional module/setting can be enabled in both engines to receive position or hit information (similar to raycasts or collision events) which are just slightly more expensive but allow for things like quick and easy liquid physics or maybe you wanted animated raindrops that drip off surfaces and characters?
Speaking of this, would it ever be possible that we could get the option of particles being calculated by either the CPU or GPU (as a mode), of which would have their own advantages over each other?
Like, a property on the emitter that determines whether the particle is calculated with the CPU or GPU. That would be interesting to see ass the GPU has a lot of power. I’ve experienced this my self by making GPU (and CPU emitters ofc) emitters in UE4 and am able to have tens to hundreds of thousands of particles with minimal performance hits.
Awesome feature, but it shows the heavy limits that 1024x1024 images impose. It would also be nice to eventually get support for smaller sizes as well.
The only thing I hate about particles is that they disappear if they are too big by moving your screen away a little from the particle and you can’t use the custom scaling feature if the particle size is larger than 10.
