Hi all,
I just wondered why blender still doesn’t have an easy option to the control of “life” of the particle system. Be it color/ size/ opacity etc.
Is there a big issue that it cant be added in the properties?
Ive seen alot of old posts regarding this, how would you approach to edit particle system’s properties over life in 2.8?
Cheers!
Currently, the whole particle system module is refactored into particle nodes.
Unfortunately, new particles development was split between several branches of development.
So, that is not easy to determine current status and we are stuck with old particles for a moment.
Old particles were refactored during 2.5 at same moment as 2.5 animation system.
So, to animate some settings not allowed by animation system, several tricks & hacks were put in place like the use of particle textures.
2.5 Particles developer, Jahka, stopped to work on Blender. And other Blender devs never really like dealing with particles bugs or taking time to rethink them until Jacques Lucke took responsability for everything nodes project.
So, that can explain why things are not obvious.
But there are ways to control settings according to particles life.
Size of particles can be controlled by a Particle Texture using a Strand/Particle mapping.
For the rest, color/opacity are not related to particles geometry or distribution. They are not settings available into Geometry panel of Particles Texture properties.
They are settings related to Material of object used as a particle instance.
To control them according to particles life, you have to use a Particle Info node.
By divding Age by Lifetime, you can obtain a satisfying factor to plug into a Color Ramp controlling Color and Opacity.
Issue is that only works for Cycles. EEVEE is not mature enough to do that, too.
I see. Thanks for the info!