In the effect creator there are currently two bugs, invisible tail particles appear as RGB blobs (see attached image), the tail particles are not random.
The above image shows the first issue, it’s probably obvious what the problem is here.
The other problem is more subtle. In a scenario when you have very few tail particles, the first particle of the tail gets emitted right at the spawning of the star that the tail is attached to. When you then give the tail a crackling effect, the center of the burst will have a crackling cloud because of those first particles.
I hope the issue becomes clear when viewing this image
I’m curious, can you tell me more why you placed an invisible tail? If the tail is invisible, why not just remove it?
(If you tell me why, I can advise you on a better solution that simply avoids this problem)
And thank you for reporting the problem with the crackling cloud. We have made some improvements there, in update 4.3.0.14. The update will be released in approximately 2 hours. Please let me know if things look better then.
The reason I want to have an invisible tail is to isolate the crackling tail from the rest of the tail. An example would be this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSXki2msPXE (not my own video). I wanted to recreate this effect by first creating the gold tail, and then an invisible tail for the crackling. A possible workaround could be to have the crackling tail having matching colors with the gold tail in this case. However, if you wanted to create a component just for the crackling effect, this wouldn’t really work because of the set color. So in short, I wanted to have an invisible tail to have a split for the visible tail, and the crackling tail.
Good to hear that the randomness issue is addressed in the next update, will let you know if this solves the problem. A similar problem happens on sequences where the timing is set to random, the first shot always starts right at the beginning of the sequence. If the sequence is in a z-shape, the first shot will always be to the left. This is especially noticeable when you have multiple of the same random sequences next to each other, as all of the will shoot in the same direction.
As for the other issue (invisible tail is not quite invisible), we don’t have a good solution yet. It’s an edge case that we do not fully support yet. I’ll post here if we have any news on that, but it might take a while.
I do remember it working in one of the earlier versions of 4.3, I don’t know the exact version however. So to me it seems like something that has been introduced in one of the updates
