Particle System Helper Component

If you are more of a visual learner there’s also a video tutorial:

The Particle System Helper Component will dramatically accelerate your Particle System workflow by saving clicks and typing. By having everything in the same place and by automatically refreshing the particle system when a property is changed you can get the particle system you are looking for in a matter of seconds. On top of that you can create and load particle system presets to accelerate your workflow even further, create a template of the setups you use more often and reuse them.

To add the component you can press the Add Particle System Helper button on the asset component inspector (it will only work if a Particle System is present in the GameObject):

Or you can directly add it:

Once added it will look like this:

Hierarchy Helpers allow you to create a copy of the current Particle System as a Child or as a Sibling GameObject and will use the new copy number to name the new copy:

This is great to quickly add more sub particle systems inside a more complex effect.

Palette Color change takes a New Color as input and then will recolor all Colors and Gradients of the Particle System to fit the new color scheme you choose:

Use this to quickly create color variations of your particle systems.

Pressing the Custom Data Auto Setup will enable the Custom Data section of the Particle System and configure it to set a random timing seed to each particle and also will add the vertex streams you need depending if you have effects that use them or not. The effects that will use these vertex streams in some cases are the 2 different Fade effects and the Texture Offset Custom Stream effect. You can then use the generated curves to tweak the effect to your liking (see Custom Vertex Streams and Custom Data Auto Setup for more details).

1. General Options gives you quick access to all main properties of the particle system. This section will save you many clicks when used properly and will speed up your workflow:

Values will be fetched when you add the component but you can press the Fetch button to fetch the values again if you need to.

1. Emission Options allows you to quickly set how the particles will be emitted. You can choose between 1 burst or constant emission rate and easily tweak the values:

1. Shape Options will change the emission pattern of the particle system. None means that the particles will spawn in the Transform origin.

1. Over Lifetime Options create a simple Color or Size Over Liftime gradient either ascendant or descendant, you can use this to quickly prototype the effect and then fine tune the curve to get the exact result you desire.

1. Particle Helper Presets refer to a copy of the data held by this component. This option will allow you to save and load the presets of this component so you can reuse it to fit your needs and accelerate your workflow. Note that when you enable this effect the script will look for this data all over your project and this can cause a couple second freeze if your project has many files.

1. Particle System Presets is very similar to the previous option but it will save all the configuration of the Particle System, it will save a full copy of it that you can then apply when you need it. Use this when you want to save some options that this component doesn’t support. Note that when you enable this effect the script will look for this data all over your project and this can cause a couple second freeze if your project has many files.

At the very bottom of the component you’ll find the Auto Apply On Change Property, when this is enabled any property change will cause the Particle System to update. If you want to avoid this and manually apply the changes instead disable the toggle and use the Apply button instead: