New to this need help

[betaman]

Hi new guy here,

My problem is with a particle system I don't think I understand this idea I have because well I am new.

The idea is can I have a plane that is unwrapped from 3dsmax imported to UDK to emit a couple of particles on It or even in It??? Like a magician pulls out a magic card?

To add if It works on a flat plane can It work on a complicated mesh object in the same way in and out of the mesh???

If so how do I go about this? If anyone can make a step by step tutorial if It's not to much trouble that would be so awesome! Thanks UDK guru's.

Please help I tried to be as descriptive as possible to get a reply that directly responds to the questions I asked thanks.

[darthviper107]

I'm not sure what specifically you want to do with particles--do you mean like have a magician pull out a card and have "magic" sparkles or something? That would be very easy to do

[betaman]

Well it's the idea I am talking about, I need a mesh object to have particles running around inside of it, think of lightning bugs trapped inside of a bottle <- something like that then, let's say the bottle is magical and when you pick it up it would sparkle as well, it might be easy for you but not for me So can anyone help?

[darthviper107]

Yes, that's not really hard at all--I don't really have the time to go over it, but just take a look at the UDN documentation and look at the particle examples included with UDK and that should get you going.

[betaman]

Oh alright, I've looked I guess I just don't understand this stuff.
I'll try again all day tomorow, I guess.
Thanks...

[betaman]

Alright I got a new question hopefully this one will get answered as It's very important to me...

Is this possible?


Explanation of the image:
The wireframe area shown here would be for a mesh in this case a building.
At the bottom right we see textures that would be used for a let's say fire effects and the smoke, so a building on fire is the example.

I need one map as shown here to be able to project particles+smoke while also wrapping the same texture to a building mesh.

Again is this possible and how does one go about it because I went here for some answers to what I thought might help me but it seems to be incomplete...
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/UE3:Mat...oordinate_(UDK)
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/UE3:Mat...rameter2D_(UDK)
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/UE3:Mat...ubUVBlend_(UDK)

With zero information on what these options do within the material editor or what they would do to a material in the editor, how does one know what each option does in the material editor?

edit:
also I can not split this into other maps, I am not allowed so I need to know if this is possible.

[darthviper107]

You wouldn't put a texture of fire on the building--you would have your building as one mesh, with normal building textures, then you would create a particle system that you would put near the building that would look like fire.

[betaman]

I know what your saying here & I know I would need these but what I am saying here is:

can a particle system utilize the maps with in that base texture, where they are in the example? &

How do I tell the particle system to locate those maps at those sections of the main texture were the red boxes are?

Is there an offest uv specification or anything related that I can say to the particle system this is where the maps I want you to use are in the texture map at locations x,y,z and the particle will read that area and say I got them, here they are in the system...

Do I have to create a visual example? I'll do my best if this is so.
I am trying to get someone to understand what I am trying to get across, but thanks for being as helpful as you can be, It is appreciated.

[kaleden]

I'd have to do some digging to discover whether you can modify the UV coordinates of normal particle shapes. If you spawned custom geometry as particles, you could modify their UV coordinates to only utilize the particle texture portion of your image. Were you planning on using that image as a flipbook, too?

[kaleden]

Oops, I probably should have mentioned this first - you could probably play around with the SubUV options in the particles, section out the image and tell the particle to only go through those last 4 frames (if you want the particle texture map to transition between those 4 swatches):
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Parti...rTutorial.html

[betaman]

Thanks Kaleden, I am glad you posted that though I stumbled upon this about 3 hours ago and have been stuck on It with trying to use my huge texture map.
So I found out those 4 "frames" of texture will equal a whole 256x256 map so if that helps anyone to help me then perfect.

Otherwise I am having huge problems with 3dsmax's DAE export format.
Also I deleted some old .upk files and said that there will be corrupted something or other I am going to assume that's bad if I try to resave those packs with new textures added? I'm just going to delete them and make new ones incase, I'll remember not to do that.

But yea new problems 3dsmax2011's DAE format is bad with edit polys, and I can't get the new setup particle system to replicate this image:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/rsrc/...ConstCurve.jpg

That's where I get stuck with setting It all up they don't overlay, about that does my plane imported mesh have to cover one of the 4 boxes or all of the four boxes? I am thinking all four.

[betaman]

Got It working with just a particlesubuv not a meshsubuv, guess It must be something I am doing with the mesh, giving up on It since I don't have a solution.

So I got another quick question what do I have to do to get these panels???
I see everyone with It but mine doesn't look like that?