The Toolbench

A scene with a few emitters is easy to author one at a time. A scene with dozens — a complete VFX pack, a particle-rich level, a library of presets — needs bulk operations. Editing each emitter individually for a small change (“make all the sparks 20% bigger,” “shift every emitter’s hue toward red”) is tedious and error-prone.

The Toolbench section covers the plugin’s nine bulk-operation and utility tools. Each is focused on a specific kind of edit. They all operate on whatever emitters are currently selected — single, multiple, or whole hierarchies via descendant inclusion.

This section walks through each tool. The five bulk-edit tools come first (Resize, Retime, Hue, Clipboard, Shifter), then four utility tools (Scan, Insert, Emit Code, Optimization Indicator).

The bulk-edit tools

Five tools that modify properties across a selection. Each opens its own floating panel:

• Resize — log-scaled slider for proportional spatial scaling. Particle sizes, spawn ranges, accelerations, beam widths — anything spatial scales together by the slider’s factor.
• Retime — log-scaled slider for proportional temporal scaling. Lifetimes, emission rates, speeds, rotation speeds, flipbook framerates — anything timing-related scales together.
• Hue — three sliders for HSV-space color shifts. Rotates the hue around the colour wheel, adjusts saturation, adjusts value. Applied to every Color graph in the selection.
• Clipboard — copy property values from one emitter, paste them across many. Unified across all emitter types, with per-property toggles in a checklist UI.
• Shifter — arithmetic operations (+, -, ×, ÷) applied to numeric properties across a selection. Bulk-shift positions, rotations, sizes by a fixed amount or factor.

All five share the same mental model: select first, configure the tool, apply. They preserve the structure of properties (graph keypoints, range bounds, vector axes) and only change values. Undo restores the originals.

The utility tools

Four tools for housekeeping, integration, and performance feedback:

• Utilities (Scan, Insert, Emit Code, Optimization Indicator) — tools that don’t modify emitter properties.
  • Scan finds every transformed emitter in the scene and flags any with format issues or outdated migrations.
  • Insert copies the Part-Icles runtime module into your workspace, ready to be required by your game scripts.
  • Emit Code generates Lua code to trigger your selected emitters via Particle:AbsoluteEmit(), with a one-click copy button.
  • Optimization Indicator shows a live 0-to-100 cost score for the current selection, with green/yellow/red colour bands.

A note on selection scope

Most bulk-edit tools default to include descendants — when you select a Folder containing many emitters, the tool operates on all of them. The toggle is in the tool’s panel, usually labelled “Include Descendants.” Turn it off to operate only on the directly-selected items.

For tools where descendant inclusion would be confusing (Clipboard, for example, which operates on specific picked properties), the toggle is replaced with explicit per-instance application.

What’s next

Resize is the first bulk-edit tool covered — it’s also the one most often reached for first. The slider model and the snapshot-based preview pattern it uses are shared with the other tools, so the chapter doubles as an introduction to the bulk-edit tools’ general behaviour.