Particles

The Waterfall

I had tons of fun doing this and I'm really proud of it i love how it looks in my scene however i do need to lower it down so it looks like its hitting the water i also need to chill out with the mist a little bit, i will tweak this before hand in as this was from the feedback we received from crit. 

Anna showed me how to make a particle interact with the environment so it like trickles down the mountain side instead of just going through it or outwards it falls down like a realistic one, so i applied this this time and was very happy with the result i got. 

I kept referring back to my waterfalls from primary research too which was a great deal of help in capturing how the water flowed and adding things like rocks and pebbles at the bottom, 

Creating a realistic candle flame.

I had a lot of fun with this i was following a tutorial online of how to do it and the guy was really insightful and taught me a lot about particle systems and even gave me some basic things i had missed along the way such as particle system curves.

I've taken some screenshots below to show my progress of messing around with different buttons to effect the particles, its a really good system to play around with and i enjoy it a lot. 

A really neat technical trick i learned from watching and listening to tutorials was the graph you could use to effect the particles. As you can see from the screenshots the effects are really realistic and all it takes is a simple tweak. 

Changing colours of the flame was an awesome thing too you could easily make it into a purple colour for say a dungeon spell in medieval times, this however was not the scene in this case so i stuck to a safe orangey yellow colour. 

I really enjoyed lighting the candles in this level, i researched online what candle flames look like and tried my best to get something realistic and close as i could to it.

I looked around at digital tutors and tutorials online to find some good ones that helped me along the way and taught me some skills i will remember for next time. 

I found that after i had created them i was being very picky and changed the effects of the particles ever so slightly that they looked more realistic to me and fit better in the scene.

The one on the right is the one i changed to the one on the left. It looked like a bunsen burner before and candles don't burn that way so it was nice to get a more filling flame and burn effect through the particle system. 

Water Fountain

The water fountain was also great to make the video below was a great guide of how to and i will take my knowledge on into the next project i do. It was a simple case of just understanding what the 'complicated' words do such as emission and world velocity. These things are hard to remember at first but keep practising and you will understand them and remember them eventually i learned from this a lot. 

I played around with the effects as you can see until i got the desired effect of a small water fountain as the vase was only small and i thought 'pluming' in those times would have been very very standard so it would only be possible to make something very small for it to make sense. 

I added little things like different foam textures and messed around in the gradient editor to just tweak little parts of the fountain, it really does help with the detail to just look at these little things and take that extra 5minutes to perfect it as best you can at that time. 

I'm very happy with what i came out with :)

changing the water colour to blue- 

I also added water splashes to create that little extra extra touch it worked really well, i got his idea from things like skyrim and the little details they include in there environments. 

Fairy Dust

I quickly added fairy dust particles in the trees also this was due to the feedback i received people thought it would just look pretty and they were right it did and it only took me 10minutes.

Adding realistic water

I think it was Mike that pointed out in feedback that the water would look better with more realism to it. I knew that unity had this function as i used it before but i wasn't too sure of how to do it from memory. So i tried at first and found some advanced water in the import assets page, i then loaded up a tutorial to make sure i didn't go horribly wrong along the way.  

As you can see it looked tons better from the standard day time water and even had an animation effect to it which will help to symbolise the sounds of the river hitting the banks and the waterfall hitting the water. It looked 100 times better now all thanks to the feedback and final crit.