Everyone knows I love particles. And if you don’t then there’s something new to learn about someone every day.

But seeing as I like particles so much, I decided to try and see if I can get some nice realistic spark effects in Unity and succeeded after a couple of hours.

And because I’m nice, I’ll let you have the package:

DOWNLOAD THE UNITY PACKAGE FOR FREE BECAUSE I LOVE YOU

The way this was done was mostly trial and error and tweaking values in the particle system.

The way I did it was first create 2 GameObjects, 1 for the spark effect in the middle, and the other for the flying sparks.

Next, I added the particle emitter to the main spark one and stuck an additive particle material on it. I then set the particle emit rate to 60, the life time to something really low (the values are all in the unity package anyway) and a random rotation. Also to make it look better I added a size over lifetime so they sort of get bigger over 2 frames.

The second part was a cone shape emitter with a large emit rate, a bounce setting and the render type set to “Stretched billboard” so they all face the direction they go.

That’s the basics of it, but there’s a lot more to it like getting the gravity just right and the lifetime just right. These are all in the package but they will depend on your scene in the end so they will still need to be tweaked.

If you like, you could add smoke particles to a 3rd emitter to give it more of a burning effect. I actually recommend this, but smoke is another tutorial that I’m sure you can find somewhere else.

Anyway, I hope this helps someone out.

PS: you could use a “one shot” for both emitters and use it as bullets hitting a wall 😀

Amazing.