Advanced

Used by: every emitter type except Trail. Beam exposes only Anim. Steps; every other type (Part, Attachment, Model, PointLight, Blur, Bloom, ColorCorrection, Atmosphere, ImageLabel) has both Anim. Steps and Linger.

You won’t reach for these properties on the first day. They live under the Advanced section of the property panel for a reason — they fine-tune simulation behaviour, fix specific corner cases, and trade off resolution against cost. Most authoring works fine with their defaults.

But when you need them, knowing what each one does matters. This chapter covers the three shared advanced properties.

A note on VelocityVectored: older saved emitters may have a VelocityVectored = true boolean attribute. The plugin reads it for backwards compatibility — it’s equivalent to DirMode = "Local" (covered in Motion). New emitters set DirMode directly; the old attribute lingers only on legacy data.

Properties at a glance

Panel label	Data attribute	Type	Default	What it does
Anim. Steps	TotalKeyFrames	number	100	How many discrete sample-steps the simulator uses per particle
Linger	PartLife	number	0	Seconds a particle persists after its Lifetime expires

Anim. Steps

UI label: Anim. Steps. Data attribute: TotalKeyFrames.

The number of discrete simulation steps the engine takes over each particle’s lifetime.

Here’s the situation. A particle lives for some duration — say, two seconds. During that time, the engine has to evaluate its Speed graph, its Size graphs, its RotSpeed graphs to advance the particle’s CFrame. Doing that work every frame at high frame-rate is expensive when many particles are live.

The plugin solves this by quantizing the simulation. It divides each particle’s lifetime into TotalKeyFrames discrete steps — 100 steps by default. Each frame, the engine computes which step the particle is currently at, and only advances the simulation when the step actually changes. Within a single step the visual interpolates between the two endpoint CFrames smoothly, but the underlying graph queries happen once per step, not once per frame.

Higher TotalKeyFrames means finer time granularity — more graph samples across the lifetime, smoother motion that follows the graphs more faithfully. Lower means coarser steps that cost less but show visible stepping on long-lived particles.

100 is the sweet spot for most particles. A long-lived particle (5+ seconds) might benefit from 200 or 300 if you can see step-changes in motion. A very short-lived particle (under a second) can drop to 50 without anyone noticing — its lifetime is already too short for the sampling resolution to matter.

You’d lower TotalKeyFrames only when you have many particles and need every microsecond. You’d raise it only when you can see visible stepping in long-lived effects.

Linger

UI label: Linger. Data attribute: PartLife.

Seconds a particle persists after its Lifetime expires, before the engine destroys it.

Wait, didn’t Lifetime decide when the particle dies?

Yes. But sometimes you want the visual to linger a moment after the simulation has stopped — the particle stays in place, frozen at its last state, then disappears. Smoke that hangs in the air after the wind has stopped pushing it; sparks that sit briefly before fading.

PartLife gives you that linger window. With PartLife = 0 (the default), the particle is destroyed immediately when its Lifetime ends. With PartLife = 0.5, it stays for an extra half-second after — frozen at whatever state the graphs ended on — then is destroyed.

This is purely a visual extension. The simulation has stopped; nothing is updating during the linger. It’s the equivalent of pausing on the last frame.

A small PartLife of 0.1 to 0.3 often makes effects feel more grounded — particles don’t blink out the moment their motion ends; they have a moment of stillness first.

What’s next

The advanced fine-tuning properties are now covered. The fourth and last shared chapter is Mesh Flipbooks — frame-by-frame texture animation, used by Part and Beam types.

Looking for “Rotation” (initial rotation ranges)? Initial rotation lives in the Motion section of the panel, alongside Rotation Mode and Rotation Speed — not Advanced. See Motion → Rotation (initial).