I have recently been looking more into the world of shaders and particle effects in the Unity environment. I think a really good way to grasp the concepts related to creating some awesome looking effects, is to reverse engineer the way some of them are done by the pro’s over at Unity.
In this article we will be looking at a simple smoke trail effect, which can be made using unities built in particle system. If you prefer to learn in the form of video:
We are going to need a texture to work with, we will use the smoke puff texture and normal map provided in the Unity particle pack:
Copy the files over to your Unity project, and for the normal map change its texture type in the inspector to normal map:
Next create a new material and change its type to particle->standard surface:
Then drag the texture and normal map into the material properties for the albedo and normal map respectively:
Change the render mode to fade, enable flipbook and soft particle and set the far fade to 0.5:
Enable emission and set the colors of the albedo and emission to different shades of grey, one lighter and one darker.
Create a particle system game object in the hierarchy, create a prefab from it and start editing it in the scene view.
In the smoke effect tab set the duration to 2 seconds, the start speed to 5, change the simulation space to world and set a small amount of negative gravity like -0.1 so that the smoke rises over time. In the renderer, drag the new material into the material property. Enable texture sheet animation and set the tiles to 5.5, you should see the sprite sheet animation start to play:
Increase the emission to around 100, we just want many more particles. In the shape tab reduce the angle to 0 and the radius to 0.1. You should see a nice stream of smoke appear:
Change the color over lifetime to go from a darker color to a lighter more transparent one as we want the smoke to fade out.
Enable size over lifetime to go from smaller to larger particles over time, as smoke tends to do. And now should have something that looks like this:
And now go attach it to something that emits smoke and you’re done!
Thanks for reading!