Hey!
I want to share a technique that I use when making muzzle flashes.
It’s pretty useful for adding some extra variety to muzzle flashes and getting more out of your flipbooks.
The basic idea is that you don’t really run through the entire flipbook on one particle but instead you use random segments of that flipbook to decrease the chances that any two particles in sequence will look too similar.
In Unitys Shuriken it could look something like this if you use a custom shader:
You would specify the range of the curve (How many frames will play during the particles lifetime) and then you would set a random start frame which will control where on the flipbook the curve starts.
The start frame would work like this:
See how it’s animating over 4 frames but the starting frame is being controlled by you. You can either set a “Random between two constants” to offset this starting frame or use random between two curves.
If you’re using VFX Graph you can set it up like this:
In both cases you need to make sure you don’t exceed the maximum number of frames otherwise it’ll looks super weird when it starts at 0 again.
Happy blasting!