Original subtitles

Everyone welcome to this

First toriel in this intro to Unity VFX series

In this tutorial we are going to be making this cute little fire here

And before we just Dive Right In There are two things that I wanted to cover really quickly that I hope you take away from this

Video

The first one probably unsurprisingly

Is hopefully after this you are a lot more comfortable and confident

Just making a basic effect in unity

This tutorial is designed to be really approachable even if you have never made an effect before

So that is the

Biggest goal here

But the second one and this one kind of applies to every video here

Is that I really really hope you were able to approach

Effects with a sense of playfulness with kind of a tinker's mindset

Effects is very much a discipline

Where there are six things to do everything and all of them are probably right

And so is one that really really rewards just

Being comfortable with

Experimenting and things being messy and imperfect and just

This

Kind of

Lethal what happens if

Approach

And that is going to let you not only learn a ton really really quickly but also just

Find the ways that you specifically really really love to make effects and what you love about them

So

I hope that you leave this video and all of the videos after this

With this question and this excitement of like

Okay what's next for this affect what can I do to push this further make this even better really make

My own

Because

That's where a lot of the magic is going to happen

So

Do that shed

And to get you the first step

On that

Let's make a fire

So

2

Create a new effect we're just going to right click anywhere in the hierarchy we are going to go down to effects and then

A particle system

Rename this real quick

And

You can see right away we've got some little puff balls how you went back in the background there

We are just going to go over to our inspector Tab and the transform and zero out

Everything in the position in the rotation

Not in the scale we need that to be at 1

And then if we

Jump back into the sea view and hit f

It is going to give us a

Very very liberal centering on

The effect itself

And

Just really quickly before anything else I'm just going to go over to the effects start Speed

And I'm going to change that from 5 to 0 just so we don't have a bunch of fuzz balls flying in our face

Now that we have

This

The first thing that I want to do is actually just

Go ahead and add a new material to this

We're going for one with these little squares where it's really easy to steal.

Want to create something similar here

So if you

Done this before then

Buy jump down into the materials folder in my project

Then I can just again

Right-click anywhere in the empty space

Go to create

And then down to material here like that

Name real quick

And then with that selected so that it's showing up in the inspector we're going to click the Shader drop down

We're going to do Universal render pipeline

We're going to go to particles

And then we're just going to go ahead and select omelette

And in here

The only thing that we need to change is our surface type

From opaque

Transparent

We don't actually need to add a texture to give this any extra shape because by default

This is just going to be a square like our little particles rights are

So now if we

Select

AR effect again and we scroll down to the bottom to the renderer

And open this

Don't worry about most of this yet we're not going to be using most of it for a while

We can just take our new material

And drag and drop that in the material slot

Or alternatively

If you just

Quick the floor kind of Bullseye to the side

Then it will bring up this selection

And you can type in anything you want there it'll give you all the options

You can double click and it will assign something

Now that we've got something that is a really good indication of

Things like

The general size shape

Color that we're going to be adding to affect the other

Material

We can go ahead and set a bunch of those attributes

A lot more accurately from the start

So we're going to start here by jumping down to our start lifetime

And

Where this is a constant of 5 Seconds

Per particle right now

We're going to click this little arrow over here

We're going to go to random between two constants instead

And we're just going to set this to 1 and 1.5

So now every particle that's created

Well

Pick a random number between 1 and 1.5

That's how many seconds that particle is going to live for

We're going to jump down to our start size

And again

Going to go to random between two constants

And set those 2.3.5

And

Something just to talk about really quickly with these two

I'm

Going to be using a lot of these

Random Rangers

And effects because these are how you get a ton of those little bits of variation

Ann and chaos

That help make something feel really organic

That helped it be a little bit different and fun to watch over and over and over stuff like that

But I'm using pretty small ranges in a lot of these cases and

That's very intentional what I'm trying to do is

Bridge the gap between

Something that is way too uniform and gets really repetitive

And feels kind of like stiff stuff like that

And something that just feels completely chaotic and inconsistent

So these little bits of Randomness are really nice way to

Bridge that and get something that holds up over

A lot of feelings and always feels fun

Just to completely ruin everything I just said we're going to go down to start rotation

Random range between two constants and we're going to set this 202 360

Because we want this to be able to start at

Any amount of rotation whatsoever

And

Finally for our last bit up here for now we're just going to

Flickinger start

And we're going to set that

2

A nice kind of

Pale gold

So

That is all we need to worry about up here in the initial attributes for now

Basically this whole second half is totally fine at the default so don't worry about any of it

And

Now we're going to start working our way

Pretty much just down the list

For a bunch of these modules

For the first one the emission rate we're just going to go ahead and increase this

215 particles per second instead of 10

Just to give us a little bit full of a flame

As we make more episodes to this

And then

The next thing that we

Really going to be playing with is this shape here

Now

As soon as I

Expand the shape tab you're going to see we get this little blue outline

And this is outlining

The base of this cone

We change the radius

You can see it get smaller stuff like that

And

What this sheet module is doing in general is just

Giving these particles

An area to pick random points within to spawn

If we uncheck this entirely then all of our particles are going to spawn

The same point in space right at the origin of the submitter

Re-enable this and in the shape shop down switch from a phone to a sphere

And you see that they get a sphere to spawn randomly with instead

So this is a really really nice way of

Adding again a little bit more Randomness and organic or of just controlling

The area that your particles are spawning within for a bunch of different shapes of effects

Or ours were actually going to be going

Pretty small again we're just going to do

A

Sphere with a radius of .1

Even that just gives us a little bit more randomness

Which is really nice

And next or going to jump down to our velocity over lifetime

And enable that really quickly

In some cases this can be

Very similar to start Speed

But what we really want out of it here

Is

Start Speed is going to be applied

Based on the shape that you have selected

And so when we have a sphere

It's going to

Send particles flying out in all directions from that sphere so it

Doesn't work for what we need here

Velocity over Lifetime on the other hand has things like this linear setting

So we can apply

Say

Velocity of Point 25

Justin Y and it's only going to move the particles up

If

In chasing more of our

Randomness we want to switch this

Random between two constants

We can do something like 25 + 1

So that we start to get

So nice variation in the speed that those Flames are moving at

That's all we're going to worry about on that one for now

Next we're going to jump down to color over lifetime enable that and expand that real quick

On this

We're going to get this gradient editor

And

This comes with a lot of really really fun flexibility so I belong to talk

You have these keys that control Alpha

So if I scale this down 20 then you can see that over the course of their lifetime

These particles go from completely transparent

And then slowly Fade up to being fully opaque

Down on the bottom here

I have

Is color keyframes so if I double click on

Biscay

Or on the color swatch down here

I can make this pure red and now

This is going to start out multiplying this white over or start color

So we'll start with that same gold

And over the course of its lifetime by the very end of its lifetime

It's going to be multiplying this read over that gold so you get a very very deep rich red

And we can add more keyframes into this just by

Working on

Whichever side of the gradient we want to

He's too

You can delete them by hitting the delete key

And again

If we open up each of those keys then we can really start to fine-tune

Best color gradient

And do like some nice rich gold in there

This is going to naturally give us an orange here but if we wanted to find unit even more

Then

We could add another key there

And get it to be even richer

Or keep it more and longer stuff like that

So

That's all we need there

Now at this point

It becomes really really obvious how much these particles are

Fighting and flickering and just not really sure how to interact with each other

So we're actually going to really quickly jump back down to a renderer

And rifle or material input

There's this thing called sort mode

And where that says None we're going to click on this drop down and we're going to do youngest in front instead

And

You can see immediately this one's up with a lot less flickering

What does sort mode is doing is telling these particles what order

They should draw in

Which one should effectively appear closest to the camera

And by selecting youngest in front

We're always going to be putting the new particle in front of all of the older particles

And so this keeps the brightest ones in the front and whines up really really creating

A much smoother nicer

Kind of

Fire illusion

Obviously you can see if still not quite perfect

So we are going to just continue down the line here

And keep chasing

Oh that nice kind of fire motion

And shape and behavior and also kind of

Cleaning that up along the way to

I'm also going to go ahead and switch back to the ham so we don't have the widget there

So

4 size of a lifetime enable that

And we once again have a

New way of interacting

What the particle and giving instructions

You can see when we enable bet

They immediately started scaling up from nothing over the course of a lifetime and that's because

Their size here is being controlled

By this animation curve

This works exactly the same as the color of a lifetime gradient

In that whichever point there in on their lifetime

The point that this curve is at at that point is going to multiply on top of

Your start size so that's why

Either starting out with a multiplier of 0

So they start with the size of the arrow

And their final multiplier right now is one

So you wind up with them at a size of

Point 32.5

If we go down into some of the defaults that they have set up for us here

We can select this downward slope

And that instead starts to give us this really nice little candle shape

Now

We can refine this even more to really really start getting

An even nicer flame motion out of that so

A couple more ways that we can interact with

S-curve we can select one of these points just by left-clicking on it and then we can just drive it around

So we can drag this one out a little bit here

And

One of the other things that we can do is we can just write like anywhere along the curve sandwich me a dad

This is going to give us another key

To mess around with

And

We can drag this one down a whole bunch

So that these Flames start smaller

And then

Grow a lot bigger and then taper back in overtime

So this is going to start to give us

This really nice kind of organic expansion that really feels a lot more like a fire

And

Finally

Last thing we can do here if you see when I select any of these keys they have these little handle sticking off of them

And

We can just go ahead and

Grab one of those handles

And use that to

Adjust the slope of this curve

So we can do something we like this and then we get the

Flames

Or we can just

Give them

A nice kind of slope like that

And this feels a lot calmer

And also gives us some of that nice organic Ness

Starting them out a little bit smaller also kind of helps again

With some of that starting goofiness

If we sweat that's one

We can just

Give them a nice little bit of an he's out here

So that they hang out at

Little size

Just a little bit longer towards the end there

And then

The

Very last thing that we're going to mess around with in here

We are just going to jump down to our rotation over lifetime

Enable that

And for angular velocity here this is just

How many degrees each of these particles is going to rotate over the course of its lifetime

We're going to do a random between two constants and we are going to switch that

Something

15

2:30

And that starts to give us just a little bit of extra rotation motion

One other thing that we can do here

If we

Hot backup real quickly

Is down below start rotation

There's this option called flip rotation which by default is set to 0

Now this is what percentage of the particles

It's going to

Invert the rotation on so right now it's doing it on 0% of them

If he set this 2.5

Half of our particles are going to start

An inverted start rotation

And also rotate in the opposite direction

First rotation so obviously doesn't matter

But

4 rotation of a lifetime this is actually really really nice because

If we wanted some of these to be rotating

Is clockwise and counterclockwise

Then our options are to either do

A rotation of -30 to 30

In which case you're going to get things all along this rain so you're going to get a bunch of things that might be rotating like

5 degrees

-5 degrees even 0 degrees

Just as much as you're going to be getting 30 or -30

But

By doing 15 to 30

And then using the flip rotation instead

What we instead wind up with

Is

1530

And -15 to -30 so you always have

Some amount of like noticeable rotation so

That's a really really nice little way to Wrangle these

Just to play around with a little bit more polishing this

This is the part where we really get into asking

What happens if I do this what does this checkbox do stuff like that

We can do things like

Mess around with the speed modifier up in the velocity over lifetime

So

By default this is just

One so all of our speeds are

Just constant values

If we do something like set this to occur

Then that becomes another curve that we can modify

And that will interact with our velocity over lifetime in the exact same way that

Size over lifetime is interacting

With our size so

We can again switch this to

East like that one so that we don't have both curse fighting year

We can give this a little tiny bit of a Slowdown up at the top

Which is going to be

Really really nice for keeping these Flames a little bit closer together

As they die off so we get a little bit Fuller of

April 9th

And then we can again

Go ahead and add a key

Drag it down a bit and

Just left that have that little bit of he's in as well

So now

These are going to kind of start out a little bit slower-moving build up some size and some energy

Start moving up a little bit faster

And then slow down again over the course of their lifetime so you wind up with this really nice much more sort of

Interesting very movement

And

There's plenty more that you can play around with here obviously even things like the speed modifier or

Already just starting to ask White

What if Mister that we can go down into things like

Things like the noise and

You want to talk about experiments obviously this does not look great to start with

But this is one where if you just start clicking around and experimenting let's say we take

The frequency to something like two so that it's a much much smaller motion

We can take the strength down 2.2

And now we start to get something that actually is kind of

Giving a little bit of charming organic

It's still kind of like wonders downward sometimes

With the noise pattern here if you leave it running for too long so we could even find him this more

And do something like it separate taxis soba

Another great Dental

So that we can do things like a specifically not a plane noise

On y so that it can't drag it down so much

And then we can just

Apply a little bit of noise on

Xnz

So they get some motion on the horizontal axis instead

You can play around with stuff like that you can see

How quickly that goes from being something that is

Really really bad

Do something that actually had some new kind of Charmin life to it

Pretty quickly just by experimenting

Will disable that just for simplicity's sake and at this point

We've got a pretty good fire on our hands

So

Let's go ahead and give it to members

We are going to start this off

Just buy

Copy and pasting are

Basement or so. Ctrl-v

And then we will

Rename this one and parent it

Under

Base fire demo

And

We're just going to

We've already got here and start making little tweaks and modifications

So far start lifetime you can switch it to .05 2.2

This is a much much bigger range than last time

Because we're not forming

This kind of cohesive body of an effect any more of these Sparks

Should be a lot more kind of

Chaotic and varied and stuff like that and it won't break it up and make it feel super erratic when we do that

So we can get away with a lot more variation here

We are going to

Off the size of these way way down so that we're just getting

Will Tony Sparks

And in our start color

We're going to

Go to random between two colors

And we're going to start some of these off a little bit darker

At kind of

A golden Orange

If we jump down into our admission rate we can just

Papa's back down to 10 we don't need as many of these

And then in our shape

We're going to make our Sphero lot bigger we're going to jump up 2.35

So that

These can really start kind of

Emerging from

Anywhere around

The edge of the fire

The other thing that we can mess with your if we want is this radius thickness that we ignored last time

This

Lets you create

Shell

Sort of thing

Carifex don't forget it just right here

And you can see

You can create this inertial to the effect in addition to this outer one

And now Sparks will only appear

Within the sphere shell so we

Won't have any emitting just in the middle of the fire where

You probably won't notice a get a whole lot of mileage out of them

This one's super optional for a case like this specifically

But it does just help you get the most mileage possible and most visibility possible out of more

More of your Sparks they won't be getting lost

Inside of the body of the fire or anything

Jumping down from there

We're just going to go to our velocity over lifetime

We can

Reduce

The top speed of these a little bit

And just cuz we don't need them to go white sohi necessarily and because

We have the longer Lifetime on some of them

Some of them are naturally going to drift pretty high up

And the other thing we can do here but is

Really really fun for things like this

Is

Down at the bottom here we've got

This radio velocity

And this is going to push them out a little bit

So if we

Randomize this something really small

LakePoint 10.25

Then you can see they start to get a little bit of a push out from the center there

And that's really really nice for the most no we want out of me Sparks in particular we kind of want them to be drifting

Off of that

And really giving us

Best

Smaller level of detail this extra bit of visual interest in motion

And stuff like that

In terms of other things

That we're going to do

200 customize the velocity of these more it we're going to go ahead and enable this limit velocity over

Lifetime

This is really really good for simulating

Air resistance drag it kind of does exactly what it sounds like and just

What's an upper limit on how fast particles can be moving

So

Just start out with 4-speed where it's at 1 right now we're just going to go ahead and switch this to occur

And then we're just going to

Select this

Nice default kind of s-curve

Where particles will

Be able to start out moving their full speed and they'll just slowly hit air resistance over

The course of their lifetimes

And then the other thing we're going to go ahead and we can hear is we're just going to set the damping

2

And you can see how this starts to apply this

Extra little bit of again just

Interesting slightly different motion

To these particles compared to the Corvette Flame

But also just

Something that really really feels like these are running into a little bit more air resistance and they don't have quite the force

The power behind them

Main body of the flame

So we get a nice little bit of subtle difference between the two there as well

We jump down to our

Her lifetime

We're not going to change a whole lot here

But you are going to let these

Run bright for a little bit longer

Go ahead and get rid of that orange key just for the sake of simplicity

And to make the u-turn

Fully dark red just a little bit sooner just again so that we're getting kind of

Some more of that contrast

And a little bit more difference in their behavior compared to the main flames

Other thing I'm going to do here's I'm actually just going to pull

Rlc's in a little bit

And I'm going to create two new Alpha keys

That are fully transparent so that these actually fade in and out a little bit

This is

Not super obvious at the tail-end

Because our

Size overlay

Still takes them down 20

But it's going to give us a nice little bit of a fade at the end

And if we decide to

What they say a little bit bigger over the course of their lifetime

Then you start to get

It was nice

Clean face at the end as well

I think they look a little bit better when

Shrink all the way down so we won't make that change here but

It's an option

And

We are going to bring the noise back for these ones so

We're just going to enable that again really quickly

And

We don't actually need the separate acts news in this case we can take those back to just

Single-axis just cuz

These aren't forming the body of this entire thing so it's kind of okay if they

Do some do some Goofy

Vertical stuff

Up to you

I'm just going to take strength down on these a little bit and the frequency up a little bit so that we're getting

In a little bit more noise and chaos

In the motion of those Sparks

And

I'm also

Going to add just a little bit of a scroll speak to these and

If we reset these to the default so you can see the texture a little bit

Then you can see

But this starts to give a little bit of animation

Who

That texture that's actually controlling the noise of these

And that gives us again just one more nice little access for a little bit of extra motion on these

Is everything for Aspergers

So the last thing I want to add to this is I just want to

Make the

Make the smoke

We have over in the other one

This is going to

In this feel like another another access becoming like kind of customized this play around on

And it's also just a really great one to give this a nice dark backer element

And just one more large shape with some meaningfully different motion

So

Do that

I'm going to go ahead and duplicate

This entire thing

Just control d

Because

The Flames are going to be a much better starting point for these then

The Embers

You can totally use either you can use a new one but

This one is a little bit more efficient so

Go ahead and

Rename this

Arijit under our demo

And

Here we'll just so

The first thing I'm going to do with these ones is I'm just going to start with me colors I'm going to switch over to random between

Two colors

And

I'm going to set these two just some really light neutral

Breads and

Oranges

And I'm going to set the alpha

Used to

85

The reason why

I am studying these to be so light

You can see here these aren't

Exactly typical smoke colored especially for like a classic campfire

The reason why I'm doing that is because

I really want these two kind of blend up out of the fire and to do that

I'm going to like

Fake

Some bounce light down in color over over life in a minute

So starting with something is pretty neutral up here and just give us a little bit of variance cuz I'm going to do most of the color

Color over lifetime

Real quickly I'm also just going to movies

Upwards a fair bit

One class to at 5 again just because I want these to feel like they're coming

Out of the fire and not like

You know

Starting

When the fires already

Falling off or something like that

And

Go ahead and just

Make these hang around for a fair bit longer

With a slightly longer lifetime

And I'm going to make them

What

Cell

Only 16.8

Instead

And the last thing I'm going to do up in this section is I'm just going to get rid of this flip rotation

And this is because I'm going to add a little bit of a fake wind to these

And for that I want them to all actually be blowing in the same

Directions

And I want the rotation to sport that so I don't actually want

Randomize rotation on this because that would give us

Something was still cool

And it actually desirable in

A lot of just like straight up, smokes

But for this one I really want to play up a little bit of directionality it's one more way that we can get some variation into this

Those are all my changes up there

And then as we move down

Scott hop around a little bit in size over lifetime

I'm going to go ahead and just

Switch this to start a little bit smaller and

And a bit bigger

And

Bissell Bissell look a lot lot better in combination with the color over lifetime

But

This is a

Really really

Big thing that I see people stumble on with

Things like smoke and dust in particular when they're first kind of getting into effects

Something that is really really good to look at with reference

With just

Anything that you're seeing out in nature

Stuff like that is how things dissipate so

A lot of things right like you've got things like

Flames or a little Sparks or stuff like that

Especially with things like Sparks were used to them dissipating by getting smaller until they just kind of wanker

Existence

Flames

Obviously like we've got here can do that by kind of light

Shrinking into these little shreds overtime

But things like

Certain flame motions but especially

Smoke dust

These things that are just like clumps of particulate that are hanging out together

A lot of those tend to

Disappear by getting

Bigger and fading out overtime because everything

In the mold of the particulate is

Spreading out and getting further away from each other

And that's what's causing it actually

Vanish

So that's why I'm making the smoke

Bigger

Over the course of its lifetime

And we're going to compliment that

Open color over lifetime we're just going to pop that's open and

Before I mess with any of the colors I'm just going to go ahead and

Call R

Transparencies to Lake

10% of 50% marks

And then I'm going to add

Some new keys at the very end of the gradients and I'm going to fade those all the way out

So

That's the other half of this in terms of diffusion

Is just

Letting it letting it really Fade Out as it's getting bigger and bigger

At the end of his lifetime so that it's really just dissipating and getting more transparent over time

And then for our colors

We are going to

Get rid of these two

And a light bright ones and puller orange all the way down to the bottom

So this is where you can really see

Where these start to come into play as bit as soon as we bring our orange down to the bottom here

Scare red down there to keep it company as well

You start to see how there's kind of that hand off between the flames

And then we'll go ahead and add two more keyframes

Will add

Nice kind of

Classic neutral Grey

Bertha Faye down to

A little bit more orange

And then we'll add one last keyframe

That we're going to make even darker and also

Push it back a little bit more saturated

And take it into a little bit of purple at the end there

And

That's something that I

In a situation like this you're not liable to notice a whole lot of we would have to let you know play bring it all the way up

To hear

But

It makes me feel good knowing that Despair and this is obviously

An access that you can play with a lot if you

Want to push this like any other elements with this

Fire to something that is a little bit richer and more magical or more physical or stuff like that

Cell

These are the kinds of subtle little details that

You can really really play around with and tweets it

Find something that

Really makes you happy and gives you like your unique effect

And

Where are red here just because this transition is a little bit harsh and I don't want quite that much back

Translate

I'm just going to

Desaturate this a little bit more

So that

Little bit

Weiner of a phase there

Or our rotation over lifetime

We don't actually really need to do anything here because now that we've gotten rid of that flip rotation

All of these are going to rotate in the same direction

If we really want to emphasize that then we can obviously just you know increase our rotation a little bit

And then We're Off to the Races there

And then finally up in our velocity over lifetime

I'm going to reset the speed modifier to just be one

And

In

Linear velocity I'm just going to add

Little tiny bit of

Motion on

The x-axis this is going to give us that wind and this is where you can really really start to see

The benefits of

Having that flip rotation turned off here

As opposed to on where you start getting

These weird little bits of disjointed Ness

So

That's that and then

I'm just going to

Slowly

Overall smoke down a little bit by taking its maximum speed down

Maybe not quite that much that's getting overlapped by the fire a lot

Southpoint 52.75

Gives us a pretty nice little smoke column

And that is our new fire

Real quickly

Let's just go ahead and we're going to

Grab the top level of this and just drag drop it down

Into our project so that it's saved as a prefab

I should have done this ages ago

Don't take that personal authorial savior work

But

Yeah I hope

I hope this was helpful I hope this help you understand

A lot lot more about

Shuriken and how you can put things together and stuff like that

And again I just I really hope that this is

A jumping off point for you but

Yeah they're so so many things

That you can keep playing with about this you could try

Making

You know different colors of fire or

You can

Play around with

Like what it would look like in different kinds of weather

One of the one of my favorite experiments one of the exercise that I actually do

In order to help myself Define the style on a new game

Is 2

Take a basic fire like this one and

Say okay what would look like with different

Personalities what does the friendliest person look this look like what changes about the shapes would change about the textures

In the motion and stuff like that

What does the most threatening ravenous version of this look like and how does that change how it moves

Was what it looks like stuff like that

Cell

They're so so many different sorts of experiments that you can

Do from here

I really really encourage you to just

Goof around with it have fun

And other than that

I will see you in the next story

Dekario