Creating The Particle - 1

num to emit = 16

decay time = 0.25

initial radius = 10

texture = beam_hotwhite.vtex

even distribution count = 12

I will guide you through all the steps of making the Golden Halo particle in good detail but I would also advise at this point that you read up on the Functions in the Particle Editor if you have not done that already. This will help you get a basic idea of what these functions do and maybe help you follow the guide better.Now the first thing we need to create your Particle Effect is some particles. Obviously. So let's get some of those.Particles are emitted by an(so easy) .. and the Dota 2 Particle Editor comes with a few types of emitters. You can access the Emitter tab by clicking on thenext to the Emitter text in the Functions Panel.For this particular particle effect, I will pick "" as I want the particles to be emitted once instead of constantly being emitted. I will control those emitted particles to get the effect I want.Once you've created the Emitter, you will now see that it shows up under the Emitter section of the Functions tab and selecting it will open up its properties.I'll make just a small change here. I will set the number of particles I want the emitter to emit to 16. Should be enough for what I am trying to make.When you edit any property from the default value, it will change color toAll good but you might have noticed that there is a new error on the viewport. A bigmust have shown up with the warning tag that reads "" .. How do we fix that? Simple. We make the system stop on end. This is generally done on pretty much all particle systemts. We do this by decaying the particles so they slowly die out ... in other words, get them to decay.We can control the lifespan of the particle by adding an. Click on the + Icon next to Operator and you will find a lot new tab with all the possible Operators. There are a good number of them, so don't be overwhelmed.Let's just look for what we want. At the top of this new tab you can see a "" input column. Just type "" in here and it will now only show you operators by that name. Less scary.Now there are so many operators to decay a particle. So which one do we go for? In this case, I will pick "" so I can control the time at which my particles decay.Once I select this Operator, I want to make a small change to the properties.I like numbers that are multiples of 4 as you might have noticed so I went with 0.25 which is 1/4 (quarter of a second) to define the time at which I want my particles to decay.As soon as you set a lifespan decay on your particles, you can see that the warning we had has now disappeared.Perfect. Now we have particles being emitted in our system .... err ... wait .. but they don't show up in the viewport. Why?Because they are. The particles are being emitted but there is nothing defined yet on how the particles should be rendered. So let's fix that shall we?First let's do the ring that makes up our halo. To render this, we need to add .. well .. a Renderer.Click on thenext to the Renderer in the Functions tab and add a new "" function.Before you close the tab, you can see there are various other renderers as I have mentioned before. But as I have analyzed, I will be using a rope to get the ring effect that I want.Perfect. Now that we have a renderer defined, our particles should show ..... errr .. wait .. They don't. Don't panic. It's cool. We know what we're doing.: In most cases, when you render a sprite, the particle should show up right away in your viewport. But we are rendering a rope in this case and ropes work slightly different. We need to define a path / position for the rope before it shows up. So let's do that.How a particular particle is born (or in other words) in to the system is controlled by the Initializers. So let's give birth to our rope by using one of those.Click on thenext to the Initializers and add a new one. But which one? That's the question. We want a ring right? So let's search for ring in the filter input column and see if anything shows up.Viola! "" sounds exactly like something we want. So let's add this initializer and see what it does.HEY!! WHAT THE ... !! You said particles will show up once you set a path. We did. They still DON'T. WHAT SSDSLDKSasd ... Hang on ... We still know what we're doing.As you can see the position of the particles is set and initialized but the viewport is still empty. We need to make small change.We did set "position along ring" but as you can see in the properties tab, the. Now we can't see a ring with zero radius, can we? NO. So let's bump that up. 10 sounds like a good value.AND WE HAVE OUR PARTICLES. They look nothing like what we want them to .. but we have them.We did define the position to be along a ring and it does seem like they're in a ring shaped form but they're not neatly distributed. So let's fix that.In the properties of "position along ring", enable "" .. it does what it says. It evenly distributes the particles along the ring.And we have our beauty.We now have our particles in a ring shaped form, but they are balls of light and a beam of light to make a halo as we wanted. This is where the particle textures will come in.Currently the rope has a default texture and that does not work for us. So go to the "Render Rope" properties and change the texture by clicking on the "" icon. This will open up the asset browser from where you can pick all the available particle textures - both stock and those that you might have custom added.Because I want something that has beams of light, I'll search for "beam" and see if anything shows up.There's quite a few of them but I think I'll go with "beam_hotwhite.vtex" because it seems to come close to what I want.Now we should have something that looks like this.That's cool but it is still not a full ring. So how do we fix that? By distributing the particles better along the ring. Let's go back to "" properties.Here you can edit the "" value to get us our full circle. I think a value of around 12 is giving us our smooth circle. So I'll go with that.