New Procedural Particle Emitter Shapes

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#1

Hi developers,

We’ve added four new properties to the particle system - Shape, ShapeStyle, ShapeInOut, and ShapePartial. When combined, these properties will allow you to emit particles from a wide range of shapes such as: boxes, spheres, discs, cylinders, and cones!

shapes

ParticleEmitter.Shape

This chooses the actual emitter shape, such as: Box, Spherical, Cylinder, or Disc. To make a cone, you can use the ShapePartial property (described below) to shrink the size of the cylinder’s top.

The Shape property defaults to a Box shape, matching the previous particle emitter behavior, and will emit from one side of the box.

Note that the overall size of the shape is determined by the emitter parent’s bounding box, the same way it always did for Box-shaped emitters. This also implies that Spherical, Cylinder, and Disc-shaped emitters will become elliptical if the parent size is non-uniform.

ParticleEmitter.ShapeStyle

This toggles between volumetric and surface-only emission.

  • Volumetric : particles can appear anywhere within the emitter’s shape
  • Surface-only emission : particles will only appear on the outside of the emitter’s shape.

This defaults to volumetric emission, which matches the original emitter behavior.

ParticleEmitter.ShapeInOut

This property decides the initial particle direction.

  • Outward : away from the shape’s center
  • Inward : towards the center of the shape

Or you can select for particles to emit in both directions.

ParticleEmitter.ShapePartial

This gives further control over the particle shape for cylinders, discs, and spheres.

  • Cylinders : shape partial controls the top radius, allowing you to make cone shapes.
  • Discs : shape partial controls the inner radius, allowing you to emit from fully closed discs to a partial annulus, to only the outer-most radius.
  • Spheres : shape partial controls the hemispherical angle, from a complete full sphere to a half sphere down to just an outward pointing cone.

We hope you enjoy these new particle system properties! Special thanks to Roblox creators @Banj0man, @BlazeImperium, @Tomarty, @starchip12 for giving valuable feedback on this feature!

403 Likes
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#2

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

#3

I’ve been waiting for this thanks! :grin:

14 Likes
#4

good good good, please add some more funny shapes, yes

i waited for this, its finnaly here :smiley:

9 Likes
#5

Note that a random-number-generation seed issue as helpfully reported by Roblox creator @BlazeImperium (here, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/imperialflame/status/1447422898893885440) is fixed and will go out in the next release of Studio.

14 Likes
#6

Ok cool now when collision particles.

40 Likes
#7

Finally, we can make particles that act like ones in blender!

Though kind of unrelated but one thing that bothers me when working with particles is when I select multiple particles and try to edit their color, size or transparency the property cannot be edited (Because its a ColorSequence or whatever). Wish it would let us just set it to a single color.

9 Likes
#8

People are seeing some bugs with a particle system for a rain effect I released some time ago, it seems like particles freeze when the camera is moved, do you know if this could have been caused by your changes?

The rain effect rapidly repositions a particle emitter across the space (in Attachments) to put rain particles in certain places.

Perhaps your change is causing the particle emitter to not recalculate its bounding box where it previously would update…

11 Likes
#9

This is amazing and I can’t wait to try it out! I am really glad that particles are being added on, I feel like they needed something else to them and this could be it.

Anyways now the real question is can this beat Unity’s particle system!??!

One thing I wanted to ask is if there are any guides or tips on how each of those shapes was made in the preview?

2 Likes
#10

People are seeing some bugs with a particle system for a rain effect I released some time ago, it seems like particles freeze when the camera is moved, do you know if this could have been caused by your changes?

Can you send me an .rblx file that shows this behaviour? I’ll take a look!

3 Likes
#11

Throw a part (box-shape is easiest) into the scene, and make it slightly transparent. Then add a particle emitter underneath. Now simply play with the four new “Shape” properties, and it should be pretty straightforward to reproduce the ones in the preview video (I’m not an artist, so the video shows pretty much the bare-bones out of the box creations).

If you have specific questions, don’t hesitate to ask here though!

4 Likes
#12

The cone shape will be great for christmas trees/ lights :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#13

Is it possible to add another feature where you can make it the shape of a mesh you imported?

5 Likes
#14

This is amazing, but what about sprite sheets for ParticleEmitter and maybe collision physics, like the Unity system? for example, Phantom Forces has its own particle system for creating the bullet impact effect as it collides with world objects and trail effect, built-in features like the ones I said could be very useful.

3 Likes
#15

We’ve experimented locally with mesh-shaped emitters, it’s on the roadmap, but unfortunately I can’t commit to an actual ETA.

8 Likes
#16

Stay tuned for a post about this very soon.

26 Likes
#17

This improvement would give a new use to the particles, we just need to see what cool things users will do

#18

I posted it as a separate bug report for better tracking purposes: Particle effect library no longer renders correctly when camera is moving

Please let me know there if you have additional questions

6 Likes
#19

This was badly needed looks great :+1:

#20

It’s easy To use the particle for make?.