Outside the Box Project Beta Work - Texturing Particle Systems

There are 3 instances in the game that I felt necessitated  a particle system to provide contextual feedback to the Player, those 3 instances were:

- Enemies moving
- Cannon Fire
- Candle Fire

To do this I added a particle system where appropriate (behind and toward the base of The Grunt, at the tip of the barrel of the Cannons and on the Candle wick). After which I modified the 3 versions Emissions so that they emitted contextually, such as the candle fire emitting constantly but with a low life span so as to reduce the height of the flame, as a candle would have a small flame.

Then it was just a case of applying appropriate textures to the separate particle systems (the textures themselves created by Chess Pearson). At first I believed it would be as simple as applying an image to a UI piece, which requires you changing the "Texture Type" of the image to "Sprite (2D and UI)" and then dragging the texture into the "Renderer" -> "Material" section (As seen in Figure 2.).

Figure 1.

I was wrong however, and was in fact required to create a Material that one would apply to a 3D model and supply the Material with the appropriate texture, as seen in Figure 1.

Then, there is a drop down list on the Material that allows you to change the "Shader" type. This needed to be changed to "Particles/Alpha Blended".

Figure 2.

Following this I was able to apply the Textured Material to the "Renderer" -> "Materials" option on the Particle Effects appropriate to the Particle System I was editing, Dirt/Dust to The Grunt, Flame to the Candle and Smoke to the Cannons.