particle documentation

Does anyone know of any good documentation for the particle system? Although the tutorials at the Particle Lab look really good they are also a real time waster. Give me a good old fashion book that explains it all let me read it through and then go and play.

RT

I liked this one:

http://eloisepasteur.wordpress.com/learning-about-particles/

Understanding particles requires a quite a bit of visualization. Something that a "book" is unlikely to give you.

Likely, you'll end up wasting more time with a book than learning at the Particle Lab.

Is so true.

I learnt the basics using a well-priced & pretty impressive Particle Wizard on sale in-game. It helped allow quick and simple parameter changes, without any need to re-compile the script, and a near immediate visual feedback of the effects of those parameter changes.

Using this tool over time, one becomes more able to predict & visualise in one's minds-eye the particle effect that will be created from a particular set of parameters, or changes in parameters.

An invaluable tool, imo, for learning the SL Particle System, as is regular trips to the Particle Lab ~ for inspiration & for well-written scripts that present very specific aspects of the Particle System in a clear and concise manner

XxX

I tried to make something similar using a web-based interface. It wasn't a terribly difficult job mainly time-consuming and unfortunately it was never fully completed (the documentation leaves a few gaps especially where a picture would explain something better than words). You can take a look at the web side of things at http://www.nandnerd.info/particlesys.php and following the link on that page visit the in-world object (copies available upon request).

That url which RJ Source provided makes excellent use of youtube to embed short clips of what the outcome is for various parameter changes. Definetly worth a visit and should be the first port of call. I'll also echo the "Particle Lab" Which Debbie mentioned as another fantastic source of information.

A good particle designer kit and experimentation. If you want to take particles to the very highest level I suspect you'll need to go to just pure experimentation with raw scripts, , because I've yet to see a particle editor that could handle things like multiple emitters, omega rotation of emitters, changes to the particle system parameters over time, etc.

Certainly the part I found hardest was the relationship between acceleration and time to target in determining speed..