Particles

Hundreds of tiny individual elements — sparks, smoke, snow, confetti — spawned, animated, and retired automatically by a particle system, not something you'd ever want to hand-place one at a time.

Add particles to a shape

Select an object, click the module Add button in the properties panel, and choose Particles. That object becomes the emitter — the source everything spawns from.

Choose a particle preset

Eight built-in presets cover the most common effects out of the box: fire, smoke, sparks, rain, snow, confetti, explosion, and bubbles, each pre-tuned with a full set of values. Pick one from the Preset dropdown, and every parameter below updates to match it. The moment you manually adjust any single value afterward, the preset dropdown flips to Custom: your changes are real edits, not locked behind whichever preset you started from.

Set the emitter shape

The source isn't limited to a single point. Emitter shape can be Point, Circle, Rect, Ring, or Edge. A campfire's sparks might spawn from a small circle at its base, while rain spawns along a wide horizontal edge above the frame. Width, Height, and an X/Y offset size and position that emitter shape relative to the object it's attached to.

Control particle emission

Two fundamentally different ways to spawn particles:

- Continuous (the default): particles stream out steadily at a set Rate (particles per interval) and Amount (how many spawn per tick), for an effect that just keeps going the whole time it's active — smoke drifting continuously, rain falling steadily.

- Burst: toggle Burst on, and particles fire all at once instead of streaming. With no repeat interval set, it's a one-shot: fire once and stop, perfect for an explosion or a confetti pop tied to a single moment. Set a Period, and it repeats that burst on a cycle instead of firing just once.

A Delay setting lets you hold off before emission starts at all, useful for choreographing a burst to land at a specific moment rather than the instant the emitter becomes active. Spawn Curve applies an easing shape to the timing of a burst's particles rather than spacing them perfectly evenly, and a Seed value makes the randomness involved genuinely repeatable — the same seed reproduces the exact same-looking burst every time, useful when you need a "random" effect to actually be consistent across takes.

Set particle lifetime and scale

Lifetime sets how long each particle survives before it's retired, with a ± range so not every particle lives exactly the same length of time — real fire and smoke never have perfectly uniform-lived particles, and this range is what keeps the effect from looking mechanically repetitive.

Scale works as a start-to-end journey, not a fixed size: a Start size, an End size, a ± range for natural variation between particles, and a Scale Curve controlling how a particle eases from its start size to its end size over its lifetime. A spark that starts small, grows, then shrinks to nothing as it fades is entirely built from these four values together.

Control particle motion

Velocity X/Y gives particles a directional push, while Radial velocity pushes them outward from the emitter's own center instead — the difference between smoke drifting consistently upward (X/Y) and sparks flying outward in every direction from an impact point (Radial). A Speed ± range keeps individual particles from all moving at exactly the same rate. Drag slows particles down over their lifetime, for an effect that loses momentum naturally rather than moving at a constant speed until it simply vanishes.

Gravity X/Y is particle-specific, entirely independent from the Physics module's own gravity setting elsewhere in your document. Snow can drift down gently while a physics-simulated object nearby falls at a completely different rate, because the two systems don't share a gravity value at all.

Add noise to particle motion

A noise field can be layered onto particle motion: Strength, Frequency, Scroll speed, and Octaves together control how much particles wander off a straight path, how fine or coarse that wandering pattern is, how quickly the noise field itself drifts over time, and how many layers of detail compound into the final motion. This is specifically what keeps smoke or fire from reading as a rigid, mechanically uniform stream. Real smoke curls and drifts unevenly, and the noise field is what reproduces that without you hand-animating a single particle.

Set rotation and color

Spin and a ± range give particles their own independent rotation as they move, rather than staying visually fixed. Color is a gradient across a particle's lifetime, not one flat color. A spark that starts bright yellow-white and cools to red as it dies is a color-over-lifetime gradient, not a filter applied afterward.

Enable particle collisions

Toggle Collide on, and particles interact with physics geometry in your scene rather than passing straight through it — sparks that bounce off a floor, snow that piles up on a surface instead of falling through it.

Use sub-emitters

On a particle's death, it can trigger an entirely separate emitter of its own: On Death picks which one, Count sets how many new particles that spawns, and Inherit Velocity carries a portion of the dying particle's own motion into the new ones. This is how a firework is built: one particle arcs upward, and at the top of its life, it dies and spawns a burst of dozens of smaller sparks that inherit its speed and direction. It's a chain reaction, not something faked with two separately-timed, unrelated emitters.