Recreating a particle

are you familiar at all with Particle Forge (PF)?
Do you have Rebellion or Trinity?

Few ways to do it. I would make a texture.anim file which would have maybe 6-8 spheres on the texture.tga with each sparks a little different. Create the texture.anim file to call each postion of the frame and use that texture.anim in a particle effect.

Use notepad++ to do a find in files for .texanim in the reference file Particle folder.

Buff_VengeanceSmall.particle uses fireyflair.texanim

C:\Program Files (x86)\Stardock Games\Sins of a Solar Empire - Trinity\TextureAnimations

TXT
textureFileName "fireyflair.tga"
numFrames 14
numFramesPerRow 14
startTopLeft [0, 0]
frameSize [34, 128]
frameStride [36, 0]

So, I would start by making a copy of that particle and renaming it, load it up in PF. Make a new .tga with the frame spacing and a new texanim that calls the .tga and the particle that calls the texanim.

start you there.

Sc2's particle system is notably more advanced than Sins. In fact, even Warcraft 3's particle system is notably more advanced than sins. In fact, even Age of Wonders 2's particle system is notably more advanced than sins. Depending on the complexity of their animations (Blizzard never puts any effort into making something sophisticated), this will range from trivial to impossible in sins. The key differences between Sins and Sc2, beyond the obvious advantages of using 3ds max over some feature creep .net 2.0 application, is that sc2 can use bones.

But you can probably cheat by pulling the Tempest textures out of sc2 by using winmpq. You'll make note that Sins doesn't support emissive maps, or any real kind of glows, on particles. Therefore, to achieve a similar look to the Tempest particles, you may need to alter the light balancing of those textures and rely on additive blending (and potentially GSExhaust for emphasized brightness). You may also want to employ alpha maps.

The trail is a bit harder. Sins only updates particle positions every so often, so if your particle travels very fast (like mine do), you can't use trails the normal way as they will look disjointed and only trail in wasteful bursts. You can "fake" trails, though, by having them travel backwards from the projectile but still remain attached to the emitter.

The "aura" can be as simple as a single texture set to a rotation. The ball itself can be a handful of cross-rotating textures to fake animation. And the trail can be another texture with random rotation variance and set to travel backwards behind the projectile. That's how I would set up my first prototype.

Texture animations can trivialize the animation portion.

The damn Romulans stole your technology! 

xsi.soase.x90x.net/Particles/Tempest_Particle/ScreenShots/TempestScreenShot.jpg

xsi.soase.x90x.net/Particles/Tempest_Particle/ScreenShots/TempestScreenShot2.jpg

Ya, I oversize them when I get in game, size to fit after textures are done

Textures smoke4.tga and plasma2.dds are stock textures. I would rename them and edit to suit, then connect new texture name to the particle.

TextureAnimations\tempest.texanim

TXT
textureFileName "tempest.tga"
numFrames 12
numFramesPerRow 6
startTopLeft [0, 0]
frameSize [90, 90]
frameStride [92, 92]

tempest.tga started as the spacing, 2 pixel spacing between each (frameStride).

Added some screenshot cutouts, rotated a few, removed black backdrop spacing. You may want to add more frames, or add the orb using a different texture set to rotate, I would at least animate the sparks and add the light blue clouds as a point effect and the orb as a point effect.

loaded the anim in the particles 1st point
added a glow effect to the ball
added the dark blue plasma effect
added a lighter blue smoke trail effect, you need to change this texture to match your effect but the trails are attached, you just need to mess with the numbers and colours. Same with plasma effect.

All the files you need to load what I did are here..
xsi.soase.x90x.net/Particles/Tempest_Particle/

to attach the effect, just find an existing ship entity with a missile weapon type and change the travel effect name

missileTravelEffectName "Weapon_PhaseCapitalMissileHeavy_Travel"

to

missileTravelEffectName "TempestLarge_Travel"
 

Should get you well on the way. So many options and routes you can take, only really limited by how much time you want to edit each frame and the other textures.

And it glows just fine. 

Nice work!

I went ahead and looked at the Tempest projectile in sc2, and it's surprisingly ugly/wasteful. It's also not comprised of any animated textures. I don't really like the idea of pulling it out of compressed screenshots, though. Personally, I try to avoid anything with so much obvious artifacting (about half of the particle textures I would have used were unsuitable for similar reasons, but then again, I am strict on quality).

I think grabbing a series of screenshots out of the sc2 editor would much more suitable if you wanted to turn it into an animated texture, particularly since you'll probably be able to grab transparency, actual animation as opposed to just rotations of the same frame, and higher resolution.

The "glows" you get from sins are incomparable to emissive maps. Once you play with a real material system there's just no real going back. You can fake them all you want, but the control of doing it at the texture level is incomparable for a lot of effects. :3

 But, again, that's only if you want to go the extra mile for quality. For me, it's no contest.

Grabbing cutouts of Screens is not advisable but this is not to create the perfect effect, rather to show how to add the effect and the assets. Should paint your own orbs, sparks and other textures.

The point of this thread is not to show how crappy PF is against super duper other effect possibilities, but "I'm trying to recreate the following particle", and I am assuming it's for use in SoaSE. I am sure we would all be very interested in seeing this high quality effect and how you came to make it.

Well, let's assume that the OP is in possession of sc2. This is what it actually looks like in sc2.

The reason I bring up the particle limitations in sins is obvious. If we want a faithful recreation, we need to know what we can't do and how that effects us. This particular particle only owes some of its effects to emissive (namely the center and the glow on the exterior), but it also uses several meshes and what appears to be some kind of falloff effect on the ring.

So you can go about this two ways. If you want a faithful recreation, you can build frames out of the sc2 editor with a black background, preferably using something like fraps to cap the full loop and then split some of those frames into a sheet. Alternatively, you can try to recreate the actual system in sins. The latter is possible in this case minus some details, but it won't look as good because alpha and additive blending can't really achieve the same kind of intensity unless you start overlapping stuff and wasting particles. For someone looking into break PF, I'd recommend learning efficiency first and shiny next. God, my old particles were horrible.

The second way you can go is the way you suggested. Even so, I still suggest using a cap out of the editor to get that black background for best results. If you don't care about being faithful, well, whatever then, but the Tempest projectile is fairly unique in its appearance and the "glow" overlap you're going to get out of a screen cut is not really going to give it a faithful appearance.

Ohhh, pretty ball  , ya much better asset to work with, if I owned SC.

If you want, I can get you some pngs or tgas to work with.

/edit

I swear every time I refresh this forum, something either breaks or changes. There was an advanced search display in the weirdest of locations one time around, and sometimes the icons break or change.

Here's some pngs I capped from the editor, if you're interested. I think if I really wanted to get deep into rebuilding this, I would remove that white texture that acts as lightrays, and have an independent one inside sins so I can control its brightness a bit better.

http://www.gameproc.com/meskstuff/wibodsbasement/butterandcats.7z

Not sure if my last post got through as new ones were added; but I wanted to express my gratitude to you myfist0!!! It's really nice that you take the time to explain this to me (and the community). It gave me a much better understanding of the particles. So thank you!!

Always TGA, and yes please, that will be a nice particle for the community 

EDIT: ya I lost a post 

Got your pngs, and I agree it should be broken into separate parts.

Depending on how big and slow it is, the more detail it should get ,
fast and small I would just use what I already made. 

It depends what you're after. Most of my projectiles travel very fast (I think most missiles are 6-8k and anything that is not a missile travels at bare minimum 11k), however the distances and stuff are much higher, so there's plenty of opportunity to see most projectiles. If I was to have a ship using a weapon as comparatively large to it as the Tempest, I'd make a 2kx2k texture sheet. Most of my sheets are, at bare minimum, 512x512 (16 frames) for small effects. But downsizing frames is easy enough - I like to provide all source material at large resolutions so you don't ever get stuck in some weird spot where you need to upscale something.

There's the possibility I can cap some frames of other stuff from sc2. I'll take a look sometime and see if anything else noteworthy would be suitable as an animated texture.

thanks 

that would be great 

put what you sent here
xsi.soase.x90x.net/Particles/Tempest_Particle/ScreenShots/ 

http://xsi.soase.x90x.net/Particles/Tempest_Particle/ScreenShots/tempest01.png

Update. Tried a new one, looks much better but still could use more work.

xsi.soase.x90x.net/Particles/Tempest_Particle/ScreenShots/TempestInGame.png

Overwritten the old assets with new ones at same address

xsi.soase.x90x.net/Particles/Tempest_Particle/ 

Now we're talking. Those are starting to look pretty fly. Unfortunately, as I can see, since it is additive the whole thing tends to blend uniformly. With such a complex texture spawning multiples would not be ideal. This is something I'll keep in mind when I look through the game for additional things.