Editing the color graph of a particle over time
Changing colors in a particle using a curve is (for some reason) a little tricky to get used to in UDK. The UI design is probably to blame for this. Once you know how to enable curve display for a particular module, this topic can probably be considered rather easy. While we're going to focus on changing particle colors using RGB values, the same approach also works with changing alpha in order to fade visible particles and make them transparent.
How to do it...
Create a new particle system, YourFolder.Cascade.ColorChanger. In the Required module of this, set the Material to a white one, such as Envy_Effects.flares.Materials.M_EFX_Flare_Burst_01 that comes with UDK.
We chose that Material because it has a Particle | Vertex Color node that the TextureSample is moderated by through a Multiply node, as shown in the next screenshot. Without it present, the color change we want to make won't work. You can read more information about this in the Vertex...