Just stumbled onto this software…

[exorio]

… been playing with it for couple of weeks. I’ve read the whole tutorials and watched the youtube videos. I kinda love this software, I’ve experienced Particle Illusion and seems that TimelineFX is sharing lots of similar things with it. But in particle illusions, I can move the emitter around and even animate them. While in TimelineFX I can’t. So far, that is the only drawback of this software I found.

Nevertheless, I’ve browsed the emitter libraries… and there’re tons of very impressive effects within the libraries.

Couple of questions :
1. Some particle effects, only use amount at “1” but still the effect explode and has tons of particles on it. Some particles are moving around, some are exploding from a point without using ellipse emitter. I try to dissect them, but I can’t seem to figure them out. I know I need to build up my own workflow on it by experimenting. But can you share with me how you generally do your works in TimelineFX?
2. How about optimizations? Like in one case, I wanted to build a large scale waterfall. I did a smaller scale waterfall, and it’s working. When I crank up the particle count and beef up the emitter, my computer gets working really hard on it… this would not be usable on gaming applications.
3. Are there any other tutorials I can look around other than from this official site? Perhaps youtube channel, websites and such?

That’s all for now, any help would be appreciated.

[imported_peterigz]

Hi glad you like the software 🙂

For the effects that spawn a lot of particles in one frame, these effects are using an area, ellipse or line effect, and the number shown under emission settings on the effects tab dictates exactly how many are spawned. So you could have a particle set up to be single and one shot, but if the effect is an ellipse with 200 set to spawn, then it will spawn 200 one shot particles and that will be that.

Generally speaking the main killer of performance is fill rate. So if you have a lot of large particles moving about then the graphics card is going to struggle to draw them all. Are you using blitzmax? You’re generally at the mercy of how Blitzmax renders things if so, which is generally ok but doesn’t take advantage of some advanced things available in opengl/directx.

I’m not aware of any 3rd party tutorials, only the ones I’ve done here, but if there’s something specific you’re trying to achieve I can try and help out here 🙂

[exorio]

Hello Peter,

No blitzbasic and such.

I’m still just playing around with TimelineFX… and I haven’t purchased any license (yet).

One that I’m having difficulties so much is creating a very large scale waterfall (think of niagara) within the software.

I can create a simple waterfall, I did it with three emitters, using fog as the water sprite, one for the water itself, one for the impact, one for the mists. But the performance can only be acceptable on very small-scale waterfall. When I crank up the line emitter and particle count my computer started to crawling, fan started to work hard and all that.

AFAIK within video games specially the older ones, they use a simple polygon mesh with animated water stream texture on them, then they just use the particles for the impact. Even on some Unity and UDK tutorials this is what they do.

Can this be done within timelineFX? At the least I can see how the end result would be?

Here’s what I came up with :
1. I was thinking about creating one smaller-scale waterfall, export it as seamless, looped animation shape for texture
2. Create a static emitter that spawn only 1 sprite, but with the animation shape, then from there I crank up the scale.
3. Add couple of no.2 and layer them… some bit offsets but they don’t move around and stay alive forever, with transparency to add the chaos impressions.
4. Add true particles for the mists and impact and for most other details.

I’m still stuck at 1-3 on how to do them in TimelineFX

Or do you have better idea/workflow I can actually test?

Thanks in advance.

[imported_peterigz]

You couldn’t really set up the scene easily in TimelineFX as it’s not designed for that. You could like you say import the texture and and using single particles set up and position them using effect handle (on the effects tab) but it would be a bit fiddly and not ideal 🙂

[exorio]

Okay so… is there any way to do a true-emitter/particle niagara scale waterfall that would run on game engines on acceptable framerate? Any suggestion or anything?

[imported_peterigz]

I would think that way most games achieve this would be to have a mesh that would be the main part of the waterfall and use a seamless animated texture that you could create in timelinefx to texture it. You could overlay that with a much less dense realtime particle emitter to make it look more random and complex at much less cost. Then at the bottom of the water fall use some rising mist emitters combined maybe with a few splashes. I’ve seen some games put splashes at the top of the waterfall but this doesn’t make sense to me unless maybe there’s rocks at the top that the water is hitting, so maybe a few splash effects if there is but that would be enough I think.

I would use animated particles for the mist as well as they can help things look a lot more complex at much less cost becasue you don’t have to use as many particles at once. I think there’s some animated particles that might work well in the environment library.

[exorio]

Thanks I’ll give it a try… I’ll be back if I really need further questions.

Great software BTW.

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