[Tutorial] Fire effect particles

In this tutorial we’ll see how to create special effects in our games, we gonna split the tutorial in two parts, starting in how to create fire with the particle system, creating a fire effect which you can use for torches or so, and the second part will be how to create smoke effect using particles as well.

To start what you have to know is that the most important thing or fact in an effect like fire using the particle system (Shuriken) in Unity, is the texture, we can change parameters in our effects and make it look as we like, but if we don’t have a good texture which define the effect’s design, it won’t look very good.

Said this, let’s move forward, first and very important as we said is get a good texture. We’ll use this one in this tutorial and you can download it to use it and follow the tutorial

Or you can créate one by yourself, in other tutorial I’ll teach how to créate a good texture for particles in Unity.

Now let’s créate a new material for particles which we will use to create our fire, head toward the project window and hit Create > Material and we are going to name it Fire, next in the inspecto we’ll change the shader from Diffuse to Particle > Additive and the main texture place our texture.

Now that we have the material ready to use, hit GameObject > Create Other > Particle System and in the scene you can see a buch of white dots as particles.

Now in the inspector we can notice the particle system (Shuriken) all the settings that we can modify in the particles, let’s begin and head toward the bottom side of the settings in the inspector to reach at the Renderer window, change the default material with the material we made before, we can see how the white dots have changed to out texture’s shape, but it doesn’t look like fire yet, right? Ok, even if our texture is the most important, is not enough to reach at the effect we want to get, to get there we have to change the settings in our particles.

Let’s change the settings for our fire particles.

Particle System

Emision and Shape

Color over Lifetime

1 = Color (White), Alpha (0).

2 = Color (R: 255 - G: 202 - B: 25), Alpha (255).

3 = Color (R: 111 - G: 0 - B: 0), Alpha (255).

4 = Color (Black), Alpha (0).

Size over Lifetime

Renderer

IMPORTANT: if we want to know what is an option for, just place the cursor over it without move it and a tooltip will appear with the explanation.

You can change it as you like, but that is the configuration that worked for me, but you can modify it as you want to, color, size, texture, imagination is the limit!

Ok hope you like it and worked for you, we will see other kind of particles and effects in another tutorials, bye!

Smoke tutorial (http://thebloodyshadows.blogspot.com/2013/08/tutorial-smoke-effect-particles.html)

~ Sycmasters