Starting with templates

The fastest way to get particles on screen is to drop a shape-emitter prefab into your scene. Each prefab ships preconfigured: emission material, emission-count material, sensible per-shape defaults, and a full property surface lifted onto the prefab root. Pick the shape, drag, tune the published properties — no material assembly, no property-type imports, no GLSL.

When to use these prefabs vs. building an emitter by hand:

  • Use a prefab when you want the standard emission flow with one of the five shapes. The five prefabs cover the common authoring cases (shooting from a box, sphere, disc, torus, or a single point) and let you tune all the usual knobs without opening the prefab.

  • Build by hand when you need a custom emission shape (mesh-based, signed-distance, parametric), need to wire a non-standard material into one of the slots that the prefabs don’t lift (for example, SelfAffectMaterial for an embedded self-affector), or you’re learning the system and want to see how the pieces fit together. See Getting started with Kanzi Particles for the hand-built flow.

The five prefabs

All five live in Asset Packages → ParticlesAssetPackage → Prefabs. Each is a Node3D root with a ParticleEmitter child; the root’s transform doubles as the emission origin and orientation.

Prefab

Use it for

BoxEmitter

Particles spawning from the surface or interior of an axis-aligned box. Shape control: Box Extents (half-extents per axis).

SphereEmitter

Particles spawning from the surface or interior of a sphere. Shape control: Radius.

DiscEmitter

Particles spawning from a disc / annulus in the local XZ plane. Shape control: Inner Radius, Outer Radius.

TorusEmitter

Particles spawning from the surface or interior of a torus in the local XZ plane. Shape control: Major Radius, Minor Radius.

PointEmitter

Particles spawning from a single point at the emitter origin. No shape parameter; use Initial Velocity Inner Angle / Outer Angle to shape the spray (cone, fountain, equatorial disc).

BoxEmitter, SphereEmitter, DiscEmitter, and TorusEmitter each carry an Emission.Volume toggle: false spawns on the boundary (surface emission), true fills the interior (volume emission). PointEmitter has no Volume toggle — a point has no interior to fill.

Drop one into a scene

  1. Make sure the asset package source is configured. If you haven’t added ParticlesAssetPackage as an asset source yet, follow the Add the asset package as a source step in Getting started with Kanzi Particles.

  2. Create a Particle System node in your scene if you don’t have one already (right-click the parent node → Create → Particle System).

  3. In Asset Packages → ParticlesAssetPackage, type the prefab name (for example, SphereEmitter) in the search box.

  4. Drag the prefab thumbnail into the Node Tree, dropping it as a child of the ParticleSystem. The prefab instance appears in the tree and particles begin emitting immediately in the Preview pane.

The published property surface

Select the prefab instance in the Node Tree. The Properties panel shows every knob the prefab lifts to the root, grouped by category:

  • Particle Emitter group — Particle Mesh, Particle Material, Maximum Amount, Sorting Type. Leave Particle Material and Particle Mesh empty to use the plugin defaults (a 2D billboard quad and a built-in rendering material), or set them to override.

  • Emission group — every property the shape’s emission material understands (lifetime, scale, initial velocity, rotation, angular velocity, density, plus the shape-specific size properties) and every property the emission-count schedule understands (Rate, Rate Variance, On Duration, Off Duration, Impulse At Cycle Start, Impulse Variance, Seed).

Editing these on the prefab instance pushes the value down to the inner ParticleEmitter via a ##Template binding. You do not need to open the prefab to author with it. For the meaning of each emission property, see Emission.

What the prefabs fix and what they hide

The prefabs fix the emission material and emission-count material to Emitter_<Shape> and EmissionCount_Schedule respectively. The shape is what defines the prefab; swapping the emission material would defeat the purpose. If you need a different emission shape or a different emission-count schedule, either pick a different prefab or build the emitter by hand (see Getting started with Kanzi Particles).

The prefabs also hide the Self Affect Material slot. The canonical authoring pattern is to add ParticleAffector nodes as siblings under the same ParticleSystem rather than embed an affector inside the emitter. If you specifically need the embedded self-affect path, open the prefab and set Self Affect Material on the inner ParticleEmitter directly.

See also

Getting started with Kanzi Particles — build an emitter by hand, with full material assembly.

Emission — what each Emission.* property does, including the shape-specific ones.

Affectors — adding affector nodes as siblings, the recommended alternative to SelfAffectMaterial.