All right welcome one welcome all in this video we are going to be talking about particles as they pertain to the level dressing process. Now, this video is not going to get into how to create particles that would be a whole nother course, rather just some good to knows when placing these around your level. Firstly, where can you find various particle effects in your content browser? Well, just like we did with the static meshes, you can select your route content folder and then selecting your filters drop down select to filter by particle systems. This is just this just has the Starter Content and soul city packs. We've got some fires and explosions, some rain type stuff, etc.

So what are some things you need to know about when working with particles? Well, one is that they kind of come in two distinct flavors, they've got this sort of looping particle effect like we've got with this flame and the steam as well. They're also what I like to call fire and forget particles like this explosion. If I drag this into the editor, you can see it go off right away. And when I released it, and if I right click and play from here, you will see that it just plays one time and then goes away, whereas my flame persists. With any particle, you can scale the size of it.

So I grabbed my flame here my p underscore fire and I'm just going to increase it to say five times the size. Now to me that looks horrendous, but maybe that's what you want. Maybe not just a good to know that you can scale them up. You have that power, that ability. other good things to note about working with particles is that you can decide how fast they play. What do I mean older In the Details panel, there is a field called custom time dilation.

And by default, it's set to 1.0. I could make this flame sort of move in slow motion here by setting it to something like point to dramatic, right. I could also go the opposite end of the spectrum and set it to something like five and now you've got a raging fire right. Now something to note with particles like this fire here, the steam does it as well, is that it's really easy to inadvertently select this particle. With something like this explosion, you just click on the icon, right, you can move it left and right, up and down, etc. However, I can select my flame here, not only by selecting this little icon here, but sometimes you can select it by clicking on the actual What do we want to say the smoke or the steam coming off of it as well?

Why is that? It's because we have so thing called translucent selection on if you are not able to do what I just did right now, it's because you might have pressed the T T isn't Tom key to toggle on or off translucent selection. So if I tap the T key, I've turned it off and now if I select my smoke, I won't actually select my particle but rather my box brush instead. I personally don't like having translucent selection on so I like to leave that off but know that if you are accidentally doing one of these and you are trying to select the wall when you accidentally select the particle, it's because you have translucent selection on that is the Tiki again. other good things to know about the particles like many other actors that you can attach them to other actors. So if I was to right click right here on my flame particle I could choose attach to it and then over in the upper right of this flyout menu I've got this I dropped icon that allows me to pick a parent actor to attach to, I will choose that.

And then my icon will allow me to select something like my garbage can here. So now, if I select my garbage can, my flame will come along for the ride. However, if I select my flame, I can move that independently of the garbage can and you can see that relationship up here in the world outliner. Anytime you see this indentation right here, that shows that this actor is attached to this actor. If I wanted to detach them, all I would need to do here is select dragon on top of the parents, and that would D select that that's good to know. Now, I said I was not going to show you how to go about creating particles in this one, but if you really must know how you can edit properties with your particle, I'm going to give you the 10 second primer here.

If you double click on any particle, and I will double click on my p underscore fire here. This is an intimidating looking editor. But long story short a particle system such as flame is made up of many emitters, all these things that I am swiping down are emitters, you've got an emitter for flames and emitter for smoke, embers, etc. And in any given emitter, you can change properties about it like its color, its initial size, how long it lasts, how long it lives, etc. And with any of these modules that you select within an emitter, there are details about it that you can change so again, I'm not going to dig deep into this again that would be a whole nother course. But that is good to know as well.

Alright guys, that is going to wrap up this discussion on particles feel free to look for opportunities to play some particles around your level. Flaming garbage can is maybe one example maybe you want to play some steam coming out of sewers that sort of thing. Maybe you could have some sparks raining out of a broken light bulbs something like that. Just some ideas to keep in mind. That is going to do it all for this one guys. We will see you in the next one.