So in the last post I talked about the Particle System basics. In this post I’ll be delving deeper in using particles systems in your game and talk about Particle Shaders and Textures.

Textures, Texture Sheets, and Shaders

Usually when we talk about Textures and Shaders we are talking about applying them to a material for a gameobject in your scene. For those of you who are new to working on the front-end side of development, a Texture determines what an object will look like (color, designs, etc.) while a Shader determines what attributes the texture will have (shininess, transparency, reflectivity, etc.).

To be more specific, a Shader is defined as:

The method to render an object. This includes code and mathematical calculations that may include the angles of light sources, the viewing angle, and any other relevant calculations. Shaders can also specify different methods depending on the graphics hardware of the end user. The parameters that can be customized in the material inspector, such as texture maps, colors and numeric values.

Most developers only interact with Unity’s standard shader. It’s very powerful and can achieve many of the effects that developers want, like glass, metallic, matte, or holographic appearances for their objects. However, in addition to the Standard Shader, there are a number of other categories of built-in shaders for specialized purposes:

• FX: Lighting and glass effects
• GUI and UI: For user interface graphics
• Mobile: Simplified high-performance shader for mobile devices
• Nature: For trees and terrain
• Particles: Particle system effects
• Skybox: For rendering background environments behind all geometry
• Sprites: For use with the 2D sprite system
• Toon: Cartoon-style rendering
• Unlit: For rendering that entirely bypasses all light & shadowing
• Legacy: The large collection of older shaders which were superseded by the Standard Shader

Using different Textures with Shaders

So far we have only used the default particle texture with the default particle shader

Let’s import more assets to work with.

Assets>Import Packages > Particles

This package comes with a variety of different textures, materials, and prefabs we can use and edit for our purposes. It also imports some default particle shaders for us to use.

Depending on the effect you want to accomplish Textures can be a single image or a sheet of images that is used like an animation sheet; and depending on how you want the texture to render in your scene you need to use a corresponding shader.

Now, I’m not going to explain the intricacies of shaders and how they work, it’s way to in depth for a short blog post. But I’ll touch on some of the basics of the two main shaders and they types of textures they work with.

Additive Shader

Look under the prefabs folder of Under Assets>Standard Assets> Prefabs

Select the Afterburner prefab and drag it into your scene. This prefab is a great example of a Particle System using Additive Shaders; what’s even better is that it’s using the same Texture as the Default-Particle System.

Additive blending is the type of blending we do when we add different colors together and add the result. This is the way that our vision works together with light and this is how we can perceive millions of different colors on our monitors — they are really just blending three different primary colors together. You can read more about here: http://www.learnopengles.com/tag/additive-blending/

This type of blending has many uses in 3D rendering, such as in particle effects which appear to give off light or overlays such as the corona around a light, or a glow effect around a light saber. If you go through the inspector of the Afterburner prefab you can see the specific settings for each of the particle system modules.

Alpha Blended Shader

Now to show you about Alpha Blended particles go into the same folder as before and select DustStorm and drag it into your scene. You can delete the afterburner prefab. The DustStorm Particle System uses a different texture than the default and afterburner systems.

This cloud has a black (0) alpha channel, making the black parts of the image not effect any of the pixels in the layers under it.

Think of a layer of colored glass or colored semitransparent plastic on top of something of another color. That’s the effect accomplished with Alpha blending. Alpha blending is a blending technique that allows for the combination of two colors allowing for transparency effects. The alpha blending equation is as follows:

final color = src color * src alpha + dest color * (1-src alpha)

What this does is linearly interpolate between the two colors according to the alpha value. If a src pixel has an alpha of 0.8 it contributes 80% of the final color while the destination pixel only contribute 20% of the final color of the new pixel color. This obviously means the lower the source pixel alpha the larger the contribution of the destination pixel. To read more about it check out this link: https://takinginitiative.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/directx-10-tutorial-6-transparency-and-alpha-blending/

Let’s see the difference between the two shaders. Go into the inspector and change the Shader of the DustStorm to Particles/Additive instead of Particles/AlphaBlended.

Now you can see that the Dust now has a glow about it as it layers, instead of the transparent quality it had earlier.

Yay! Shaders and Textures complete! In the next post I’ll show you how to make your particles interact with objects in your scene.

Happy Coding!

-TheNappingKat