Cascade Tutorials?

[jaybles169]

Hey guys

I've been searching endlessly for some good Cascade tutorials (or even just some documentation!) on the forums, on youtube, and just on the internet in general, and I can't find anything halfway decent. Yes, I've already checked out the 3dBuzz Flame Particle tut, but that doesn't explore very many of the vast amount of options that seem to be available.

I want to know how to incorporate geometry into my particle systems, how to make nova effects that explode from a center point outward in all directions, etc. I'm looking for beginner tuts, advanced technique tuts...anything!

Particle systems fascinate me and it's been a bummer so far that I haven't been able to find information on how to use UDK's! Any help would be great.

Thanks in advance
-jb

[Hitpawz]

It's pretty easy to get a mesh emitted. Just right click and choose the appropriate TYPE DATA. Then fill in the blanks.

The main thing about particles is you have to remember that the materials for the assets need to be set up properly or nothing usually shows up.

Mainly they need to be unlit, using an emissive channel and flagged for use with particle systems. It helps tremendously to multiply a vertex color by the texture image and alpha so you can control color and fade during lifetime.

Once you have the right materials set up, just playing with the emitters is the best tutorial you can get but the documentation is also a good resource. There's also some youtube videos I believe. It certainly helps if you've built particle FX in the past with various other tools, but it's not paramount to learning cascade.

[kaleden]

If you love particles, I'd suggest taking a look at Visual FX for Games: Real-Time Effects Using Unreal Engine 3 with Maxime Deleris. Although there are a couple audio issues, I thought Maxime did a fantastic job of presenting and explaining particle system concepts in UDK. Because he focuses on performance saving techniques, the majority of the particles are 2D, though he does use some 3D assets in the explosion tutorials.

[jaybles169]

Cool, thanks guys.

Hitpawz - I couldn't find any actual documentation. Do you have a link? Thanks for the info though.

kaleden - Nice, I'll have to look into that DVD.