simple particle fade in/out function

[Justin]

hello all, looking for the particle function that will fade a particle on, and then fade the particle off, over the lifetime of the particle……

[bnw]

It’s in the fxguide particle function article: http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=5

…but basically you want “transparency = sin(lifetimeI*3.14)” 😉

[king koret]

thanks for the reply Loops – that almost works! Its just that the very 1st frame of each particle is “on” then it dissapears on the second frame and from that point on the equation works just fine. I don’t really want to paint out all those ‘dots’! Any further ideas would be appreciated…. thanks anyway for your post.

[bnw]

You’re right. How weird. The same thing happens even with “transparency = 1.0”, particles get born fully opaque. Grr!

Turning TimeSteps up to like 25 or even more seems to fix it if you can deal with the slowdown.

[Shane]

Hey Fellas,

Don’t forget that particle manipulators and functions only take effect after the birth of a particle. This means that particles inherit the particle generators parameters first then their manipultors.

The simple answer is to adjust your particles transperncy to zero under the geometry submenu and let the manipultor control the transparency since particles will be born transparent.

Now I’ll bet you’ll want to control the transparency but now you can’t because you’ve set them to zero. Add *magnitude to the end of your expression and use magnitude to control at what level of transparency you want particle to be born at. .05 = 95% tranparent. 1 = 100% full.

enjoy

[bnw]

That’s a much better solution 🙂

[king koret]

Thank you both……….all good!!

[Author]

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