Understanding particle system tools

There are a bunch of tools and off-the-shelf solutions available for creating particle effects. While you need not know all of them, you certainly will encounter some of them in your work as a real-time FX artist. Many studios might do part of a simulation in one of their own custom tools or one of the tools mentioned here. You may need to receive data such as vector fields from one of these tools and incorporate it into your Niagara System. You may also receive references for effects produced by one of these tools and may be required to recreate them in Niagara.

A lot of these tools have been around for quite some time and have shaped the workflows and terminology used by FX teams. Niagara builds on these concepts.

The following are some of the most widely used particle system tools.

Afterburn

Afterburn, developed by Sitni Sati, is a volumetric particle effects plugin. It has been used in VFX for clouds, smoke, explosions, and other...