Debrief 1: What kept repeating

Four exercises are behind you. This page adds nothing new. It sets down what the four had in common.

The procedure

Look at the Done before line of each Log. The same steps came back every time. Put in order, they are these:

	Step	Where you did it
1	Build one particle as an ordinary instance. Give it the size, shape, material and colour a single particle should have.	Exercises 1 and 4
2	Transform it.	Exercises 1 and 4
3	Say when particles are made and how long they last: Rate, Lifetime, or the Emit, Delay and Duration boxes.	Exercises 1, 2 and 3
4	Say where they go: Speed, Drag, SpreadAngle, Acceleration.	Exercises 1, 2 and 4
5	Say what they look like as they age: Transparency, Size, Color.	Exercise 4
6	Fire it and watch: Enabled for a stream, Emit for a single play. Adjust and fire again.	Every exercise

That is the whole of building an effect with this plugin. The three middle steps are also the names of three sections in the Properties panel: Emission, Motion and Appearance. Each later exercise keeps this procedure and changes one part of it.

Step 6 is not a last step. In every exercise the effect was running while the values were typed. The work is a loop: change one value, look, change the next.

The three ways a value is entered

Every row you have typed into took one of three forms.

Form	You type	Each particle gets	Rows met so far
One number	20	That value.	Drag, Rate, Speed
Two numbers	0.6, 1.4	One value of its own, picked between the two when it is made and kept for life.	Lifetime, Speed
A graph	Draw it with ⋯	A value that changes with its age.	Transparency, Size, Color

Speed is in two rows of the table on purpose. A graph row takes all three forms: one number, two numbers, or a drawn graph.

CAUTION

Two numbers do not always mean “pick between”. In SpreadAngle the two numbers are two separate angles. In Acceleration the three numbers are the three directions of the world. The placeholder text in an empty box says which it is: min, max or x, y or x, y, z.

What stayed particular

Not everything repeated. Each exercise also had one thing that belonged to it alone, and that no rule above would have told you.

Exercise	The particular thing
1	Speed is 0 on a new emitter. Nothing travels until it is entered.
2	Drag slows the travel from Speed and leaves the fall from Acceleration alone.
3	The Emit button fires exactly what the boxes say, and on a new emitter they say one particle.
4	A number typed into a graph’s box replaces the drawn graph.

Expect the same of every exercise that follows: a procedure you already know, and one thing that is new.