Controlling the “hotness” of flame line particle emitter

[Simon Ubsdell]

If you turn off the Additive Blend in the Cell Controls you’ll get a less hot result – and you can then of course play with the Color Over Life gradient to get the colors that suit you.

But it’s the Additive blend that’s making it “burn out” as it were!

You may however just want to play with the brightness of the middle color of the gradient to see if that helps first.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Josh Bass]

Thanks. I played with that active blend setting but it looked icky when I turned it off (dark orange/brown mush with no variation) so I figured that was the wrong track and didn’t mess with it again. Thanks for enlightening me though. I’ll play some more.

[Simon Ubsdell]

The Additive Blend makes each instance of the particle that overlaps another become brighter (the pixels values get added together) which is why I mentioned it in this context.

It sounds as though all you need to do is follow my other suggestion which is to reduce the brightness of the middle color in the Color Over Life gradient.

Or you could do something simpler still which is to apply a Colorize filter (or any other color correction filter that works for you) to the whole particle system and adjust it that way.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Josh Bass]

Thanks. I figured out later that’s how additive blend worked. Re: changing the brightness of the brightest part of the color over life, if you look at the particular emitter it’s already really “dim” to begin with. Maybe that’s a moot point with additive blend but I thought I’d point it out.

What I ended up doing was changing it from color over life to “pick from color range”. For whatever reason that did the trick, and I was able to adjust birth rate settings from there to tweak how hot I let it get, and if it got too “thin” I’d compensate with other settings.