Special Effects Creation

Special Effects THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND! First, I started with playing with the details of the particle system to create something that resembled the effects of sand falling. I used the basic particle effect and added collision, a large initial and dwindling emission, and changed the emitter type to Edge. This created a wall of sand effect. But I wanted a lot more density to the effect so I created a .png texture that simulated a blurry wave of sand with little repetition and alpha transparency and set it to alpha/blended Particle shader material. Then I used it for the material in the render settings, and set the stretched billboard mode so that the speed could stretch the sand texture as it fell to add more dynamics to the effect. I also adjusted the emissions to use less particles as this saves computation now that we have the texture and not individual grains of sand. I attached sound source and capsule collider trigger components to the particle system's prefab, and then I wrote a script to control its behavior. The script first acquires the particle system and audio source at Start, in order to call them both to play when the trigger object is triggered by the player, but only if they are not already playing. This prevents the effect from being interrupted and breaking realism. Then I placed them in the level and tested it out, not forgetting to add the Player tag to the controller.