A bit more techy but a very detailed article FX Artists and programming particle systems. He says really nice/smart/important things like:
FX Artists in general will blow your mind
our goal is to minimize the amount of time they spend to create these effects". For that I already praise him.
Artists want every single feature exposed to them
your artists will want to be able to animate everything about your particle system. Furthermore, ‘startValue’ and ‘endValue’ are not enough
A big issue that many artists have as they create more and more particle systems is being able to template systems so they don’t have to keep re-creating them.
About a good particle editor:
please do yourself a service and create a front-end worthy of your work
but they are visual people. I’m not claiming it to be the perfect front-end solution, but a node-based component graph editor like the image below is a much better solution for the way artists think
You will never have enough features
I can’t explain how much I agree to this and would like to add: Make f*cking sure the artist can test his stuff as efficient as possible. Ingame-Hot-Reloading is a must and an artist who has to restart the game everytime he wants to see a change on his effects is a depressed creature full of sadness and sorrow after a short time of the project.
