Yesterday I explained how I created the plasma balls that are used for the weapons. The ball itself is only half the job, it also needs a trail of glowing sparks! For that, I created a green glowing ball pretty much the same way I created the plasma ball. This time, however, the shape is circular, and the center is pure white.

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For this tutorials, I assume that you have at least some basic knowledge of the Torque particle engine. I won’t be explaining the very basics such as creating an emitter and loading particle sprites. This effect has only one emitter, so I’m just gonna use the default emitter. To start, I did the following things with the emitter:

  • load the green particle for the image;
  • set type to POINT;
  • set orientation to FIXED;
  • uncheck all checkboxes, except “Fixed aspect”, “Intense particles” and “Rotate emission”

Next, I set all the emitter graph parameters. I’m just gonna put the screenshots of the things I changed here.

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That’s it for the emitter. For the effect itself, mode should be set to INFINITE, wich means the effect keeps going, and “Use effect collisions” shouldn’t be checked. The result is a slow stream of bright green particles that slowly fades.
This effect is connected to the plasma ball sprite so it moves along with it. This is called “mounting” in Torque. I’m not gonna cover this in great detail, examples of this are in the Torque documentation. Because we checked “Rotate emission” in the emitter options, the direction of the particles is automatically adjusted to the direction of the plasma ball. The particles always move in the same direction as the projectile, but much slower, so they seem to follow it.