Context of Practice 3: Weather Test

So after thinking in detail about the different weather that could be used I decided that I wanted to look more in detail into creating a snowy environment. It seems like it could be a really good opportunity to look into particle effects more, especially since I have only briefly touched upon them in Unity, and then also create something that look visual beautiful at the same time.

As I knew this was what I was going to looking at, I wanted to ensure that I could create snow so that I didn’t have to spend a lot of time doing it later on when I needed to be getting doing other things, like modelling. So now seemed like the perfect time to do this test. It went fairly well and I was able to produce a particle effect that did resemble snow to an extent, which I was happy with. I will definitely aim for a slightly better result in the final game level so that I can create a level that I am super happy with.

'Light Snow' PreFab
Below are the steps that I used in order to add this light snow into my game level. This was fairly easily to do but I did follow a tutorial in order to understand it in more detail. There were only a few changes to settings that I really made and these were the size of the emission which is seen in the first couple of steps below.

 I then looked at changing the maximum and minimum energy strength on the particles. This changes their life span in seconds and is how long they are going to last in the scene and therefore will determine how far they are going to fall through the scene. I kept this on a fairly low number as I didn't want to to fall beyond the terrain for this test and it worked well.

I then looked at changing the maximum and minimum amount of emissions that would occur in the scene as the volume of snow at this stage wasn't a lot. I moved this up to around 100 to see what effect it would have and then even had a look at what it would look like if it was around 1000 which did create more of a blizzard environment. For the purpose of this test I found that keeping it around 200 was a good amount.

 I then had a quick look at what it would look like if I used a different type of texture for the snow effect which did look nice and would be good if it was combined with others and work together. But for now I put it back to the original look as it worked better for the scene.

Final video of test
Below is the final video test footage taken from Unity and I am really happy with the look and using this prefab I want to them try to recreate it with my own particle system so that I can successfully create one that will start on awake and I can alter to make it look even better than this one.

Making my Own Snow with Particles 
Below I have then started to look at how I can use the particle system, and not the ones already created, to be able to create a really nice snowy environment that falls at just the right speed. I wanted to create my own particle system as I felt that this one above worked, but I feel that I could make it look so much better with a proper system in place, so below are the steps that I took to create this. The whole process was fairly easy to make and I found that I was able to complete it fairly quickly simply by playing with the tools that were available to me. I didn't really find that I needed much help and I was very happy with the final outcome of the level.

I have made the snow move a lot faster than it would have done using the prefab and found that this worked so much better as I could control a lot more settings in the long run. The snow looks like it is falling heavier than last time and this is the effect that I wanted to produce and it can easily be changed if need to in the end to either be thinner or lighter.