Sweet Beautiful Particles

Second chunky blog post in one day - must be making progress! ;)

This next part of my project made me squeal in joy and smile uncontrollably, so I hope it'll do the same for you. :)

The forest now has these little lovelies!

They're hidden in a secret area though, so you'll just have to listen carefully to find them...

I haven't set up a proper particle effect before, and for this one I took UE4's existing dust particle and altered it. Also a huge thank you to my friend Anthony for helping me get my head around it - I couldn't have done it without you!

Although I used an existing particle as a base, it still took some time getting the effect just right. I started off by making my own texture to use as a material for the particles:

It's worth noting that originally the particle had one huge face in the centre, though it was split into 4 different particle slots so only showed a portion of it! With a face in each corner the issue was solved and so the faces ended up being displayed properly. :) 

After the texture was happy, it was then time to add an emissive to it so that the faces glow. Here's what the material set up looks like:

Then came the task of testing strengths of both the brightness and the amount of particles that appear on screen at once. Here are a few screenshots of different intensities:

The first test was a bit too small. There were enough particles, but for the most part you couldn't see their faces. With that in mind, the sizing of the particles was changed...

Oh my.

Now this is visibly better for their faces, but now we have too many of them. Hmm...

There we go! :D Much better.

They tie in with the music that Daniel made for me. There's a magical sounding track that I want to use to lead players to a specific part of the forest - it's here that they'll find these little ones. It's not a huge thing but hopefully it will create a few smiles. :)

Then just to finish up on, here are a few more screenshots: