Magical Box

Concept • Documentation • Tutorial • FAQ

Magical Box (MB) is an expandable multi-purpose particle engine. We created Magical Box because we hardly missed some advanced features in Unity's built-in Particlesystem (that was before Shuriken came into play). So while developing Magical Box we focused on the following points:

• Modularity: Allow coders to easily plug their own stuff into both the engine and it's editor.
• Performance: Avoid unneccessary calculations, let multiple emitters share a single mesh etc…
• Fun: Make designing Particle FX an interactive and visually appealing experience.
• 2D: Support a broad range of 2D features like Circle, Rectangle and Imagemap emitters

• Full-blown Editor GUI: Cut/Copy/Paste all objects and parameters
• Gizmo-Support while editing
• Particle Debugging
• Automatic texture packing and material management
• Hierarchy:
  • Full default hierarchy support, just make sure all Magical Box objects have a ParticleSystem somewhere up the tree
  • Use Anchors or your own game objects to group emitters.
  • Nested emitters and anchors

• Modular design: only used Parameters will be calculated
• Unlimited emitters per Particlesystem, particles will be batched by material, not by emitter
• ParticleSystems using the same material can be dynamically batched
• Several 2D/3D billboarding modes

• Control single emitters or a whole ParticleSystem at once
• Arrange timing of Emitters using a visual timeline editor
• Use Callback-based and/or SendMessage based event system, link events from within the editor
• Pooling Manager included for easy fx cloning
• playMaker actions available

• 2D: Circular/Arc/“Donut”, Rectangle, HollowRectangle, ImageMap
• 3D: Spherical, Box, HollowBox
• Vector: Line, Polygon
• Mesh: Vertex, Edge, Surface
• Spline (needs Curvy)

• Every child emitter can be used as a trail
• Animate emission rate over emitter's lifetime
• Distribute particles even over EmitterType's shape

• Fine control birth and lifetime values
• Almost any value can be animated using curves
• Built-in particle parameters:
  • Image animation (OneShot,Loop,Ping-Pong,Manual)
  • Lifetime (“Energy”)
  • Size (axis independent)
  • Velocity, Acceleration, Friction
  • Mass, Gravity
  • World Collider
  • ForceFields: Radial, Rectangle, Spherical
  • Color: Fixed, Timeline or based on keys or gradients. Auto-Fade In/Out.
  • Heading (i.e. direction velocity and acceleration is applied to)
  • Orientation (i.e. Angular velocity) with several modes (including AlignToVelocity, AlignToHeading)
  • Rotation (around emitter)
  • Transform Connector (instantiate & sync GameObjects with particles)
  • MoveAlongSpline, Spline/Tubular force field (needs Curvy)
  • Lightning
  • Math Operator

• Create new emitter types and parameters easily within minutes. Just inherit from the respective base class and add your custom logic (C# only)
• Let your custom parameters add individual data fields to particles
• Fully integrate your custom classes into the Magical Box editor by creating your custom editor handler and using the provided GUI helper functions.