Here’s a quick look at a useful trick for using the Shuriken Particle System in Unity3D to quickly make procedural arrangements of static elements.
I was playing with the idea of rings around planets when someone on twitter suggested an asteroid belt around the planets. This was an appealing idea so I considered how to quickly prototype it to get an idea of how it might work. Fortunately the Shuriken particle system in Unity3D is perfect for getting this up and running quickly. First I whipped up a ring mesh in Blender to use as the Mesh emitter, so all my asteroids would originate somewhere on the mesh (the edges in this particular case).
Here you can see the frame of the mesh that I use as my emission source.
Now there’s several important settings to use if you want the particle system to behave more like a prop than a dynamic effect.
1- Set the Start Lifetime to max – for me Unity capped the value at 100000 seconds – which is ~27 hours – so those particles aren’t dying any time soon.
2- Turn off the emission rate and use a single burst to spawn all your particles at once (also be sure to turn off looping). Here you can choose the range of how many particles you’d like to decorate with. For my asteroid belts I set it between 0 and 300 so that some planets would only have a few scattered here and there.
3- Use mesh renderers under the Render setting (optional). For me I wanted to use the same material as my planet for the asteroids and also didn’t want the default billboarding effect here so I was able to select a few different meshes to randomly assign to each particle.
Even if you want more control over your scene decoration at a later point, I think using Shuriken as a quick visual prototype is amazingly quick, clean and ideal for rapid iteration. In my case I might end up just sticking with my particle belt because it does pretty much everything I need it to do.
There’s lots of great ways to use this little hack, so be creative and see what you can do with it.