On a second note, one way I can think of to bring us one step closer to making ghost shells using the phase feature is as follows: currently, my understanding is that the star burn duration sets the total burn time for all phases. And when you add a phase, how long each phase lasts is split equal parts by the amount of phases. So if you have a star burn duration of 1.00 second, and you add a second phase, the 1st phase will be the color the star burns for the first 0.50 seconds, the second will be the last 0.50 seconds. If you add a third phase, then it will be split into thirds.
I think a better way to do this is to have one parameter for total star burn duration, and then add a percentage parameter for each phase tab that we can adjust. For example, we will be able to set the 1st phase to be say 70% of the star burn time and then we can set the 2nd phase to last for 10% of the star burn time, 3rd phase for 20% and so on and so forth.
When more than one phase is engaged, you can program it to automatically adjust the other phase percentages when any one of the other phase percentages is being adjusted relative to each other to account for any “gaps” so to speak. So if I have two phase tabs engaged, as I adjust the percentage of phase 1, the 2nd tab automatically adjusts to accommodate for the change.
Alternatively, you could add separate star burn times for each phase that will just be summed up at the end. So on phase one if I set star burn duration to 1.00 second, and then I add a 2nd phase and set it to 0.30 seconds, the star burn duration of the 2nd phase will be separate from the first and instead summed onto the first afterwards to make a new total of 1.3s.
Good news, we just added this today. The update will be online in 20min or so. Please let me know how it works for you.
Yes, this is how it currently works. You suggest adding an adjustment of when the colors change - I think this is a good idea and I’ve taken a note of this.
I would like to suggest simply implementing a colour over lifetime for the different particles. That way you can roll two tools (the colour change or phases and the Brightness over Time) into one tool. This would give several advantages:
The user would get complete control over when the colour changes should happen.
You would have an infinite amount of colour changes.
It would also make it much simpler and easier to create tails. Currently, we have to use several tails to simulate the colour change over time of the sparks. Implementing a colour over lifetime would cut out having to tinker with several different tails, as well as cutting down the number of particles considerably, which presumably would make everything run smoother.
If possible, can a system where the tail can use the colour of its “mother” star? It could help a lot to simulate some mini-tails which in a way that it is super-versatile.
You can give them the same colour manually. I’m guessing you are suggesting a tick box for an “inherit colour from parent particle” function, to speed up things?
Exactly. I use a lot the feature of changing the colour directly in the show editor, since I don’t have the quick tools to make multiple instances with many colours that you have in Pro version, and this method would be great I think.
