Well, this is the problem…
I have a spaceship shooting laser bullets. The laser bullets are made by a particle system, with a bullet mesh/laser material parented to the emitter, and it works very well.
But I animated the material with an alpha material IPO so the bullets disappear after, let’say, 100 frames. The problem is that of course ALL the bullets disappear after 100 frames, also the “just shooting now” ones.
Is there a way to let the material fade on distance and not on time, so only the “old” bullets disappear as they are shooted?
Don’t know if I explained myself well, but any help would be really appreciated.
Thanks.
What do you need the Material IPO for? You could just control the lifetime of the bullets with the ‘life’ value… seems too easy to solve your problem though…
What do you need the Material IPO for? You could just control the lifetime of the bullets with the ‘life’ value… seems too easy to solve your problem though…
Yes, you are right.
But suppose I need a bullet material halo to grow at frame 120 from the start of the single bullet, and this for every bullet (particle), so at different times for each bullet… what I’ll need should be some kind of Ipo that tell “after 120 frames the particle as been emitted, the material act this way, etc.”.
Don’t really know if such a thing is possible or if it can be faked in any way (besides give individual emitter for each different bullet).
When you set a Material IPO for the emitter, the frames 0-100 reflect the lifetime of one particle.
For examlple, you can blow up the particle shortly before it dies by keying the HaSize (Halo Size) and increase it at frame 95. No matter what the life value of your particle system is, the single particle will blow up shortly before it disappears.
The same technique can be used to fade out the particles or let them change color during their lifetime. Looks nice when you make sparks that turn from yellow to red…
