Particles and dynamic effects

In order to make my scene appear more lifelike and interesting I wanted to add some dynamic effects. I started by looking into particle systems for my fountain. The first stage was to try and create a material for the particle. I added a material of a round water drop. This did not look very good when one particle was being emitted but the more particles there were there the more effective it looked.

To create the fountain style motion I began by messing with the initial velocity of the particle. I wanted it to be moving in an upward direction mainly and then falling back down in various directions. To achieve this I put a large velocity in the Z-axis and smaller ones in the X and Y. This meant the particles went upwards mainly and then out in all directions after a while.

To get the particles to fall back to the ground I added a constant acceleration module with a value of -250 in the Z-axis, this pulled the particles back down to the ground.

The next thing to solve was that the particles would come back down after being emitted from the fountain and then simply fall through the ground forever. To solve this I added a kill module in Cascade and set it to "floor". This meant that when the particle reached that low boundary it would be killed. This also meant that the particle system would continue to run as it never reached the maximum number of particles, whereas previously it would only run for a number of seconds.

I then wanted to add water falling out of some of the lions mouths. I initially tried to do this with particles but I was struggling to get the movement I wanted. My next approach was to build a simple cylinder mesh in the shape that I wanted the water to move in and add my water shader from earlier.

This gave the cylinders a water like look to them however the water was not moving correctly. To alter this I sped up the panners in the shader so it looked like the water was being propelled out the lions mouth. This made the effect look better. I am still not entirely happy with the effect but for times sake I must move on and return at a later date if possible.

After the fountain was looking okay I moved on to add some quick movement to my bushes, bed curtains and banners. I began with the bushes by adding the following nodes in the material:

This set up gave a slight ripple to the leaves which worked well. I did not want to have too much movement or it would look unnatural.

For my net curtains I used a sine node and a panner in the material editor, plugged into the world position offset. This gave a simple ripple movement which looks like a light breeze is affecting the fabric. I set the panner to the same kind of value as the bush movement to make sure the wind speed is consistent throughout the level.