Animation tips:
• For creating trail effects, such as a missile
or comet tail, use the Relative to Animation option. It will cause the
emission to always follow your emitter, wherever it moves.
Direction of Emission
In the middle of the Particle Creation
controls, you will see a circle with a small diamond in it. This Direction Wheel is used to set the direction in which the
particles will be sent forth.
Simply click on the diamond and drag it in the
direction of your preference. For example, if you want the particles to
move toward the right side of the screen, drag the diamond to the right
hand side of the Direction Wheel. The three readout windows will tell you
the angle of your trajectory.
Absolute is the angle in
relation to the canvas, in degrees.
Relative is the angle relative
to the animation, in degrees.
Turns will tell you how many
times you have made a complete rotation, in a percentage.
We want our flames to appear to be coming up and out of the window, so
set the Emission Angle to an angle up and slightly to the right. The
Absolute angle is 23.24 in my settings.
Angle Range
Once you have the direction set, you can use
the Angle Range control to adjust the width of the
particle stream. The readout is in degrees to either side of your
direction. So if you set the Angle range to 10, you will get a stream of
particles 20 degrees wide, centered on the direction you have selected
using the circular direction control.
We mostly want our flames to go up, without spreading very much in
width, so we will use a fairly low Angle Range of 13.
Direction tips:
• For emissions that are intended to come
toward the camera, use an angle range of 180, to get the particles to
emerge in every direction.
Scale
The Scale adjusts the overall size of the
entire effect. This means that it alters not only the size of the
particles, but the relative distance between them, and the size of the
overall path that they will follow throughout their lifetime. Later we
will work with a control that adjusts only the size of the particles
themselves.
Let’s reduce the scale slightly to tighten up our effect, and match
the overall size of the effect better to our background. A Scale of 0.80
should do nicely.
Draw In Front/Behind
At the bottom of the Particle Creation section
is a menu with two options.
Draw New Particles Behind means that new particles will appear behind the existing particles. This
can often be useful for hiding the actual appearance of the particles, if
your emitter is visible.
Draw New Particles In Front means that new particles will appear in front of the existing particles,
therefore the actual creation of each particle will be visible.
Setting this to Draw New Particles Behind will make the flames appear
to be coming toward us, out of the window. The Particle Creation section
of your controls should now look like this:
