Source Particle Editor - Games

I'm reaching a point in my Tremors mod where I'd like to create some particle effects to emphasize the effects of certain NPC animations or weapons. I've figured out enough to open the editor, mess around a bit and make something incredibly simple, but from here I feel like I'm fighting the editor itself, which isn't in the mood to deal with me right now. For one thing, there's the color options. I figured out how to render my particles and choose a sprite to implement as a base, but It's rare that I see a color-picker tool less helpful or responsive. Oh, I can brute-force it enough that the swatch itself will look ALMOST like the sandy color I want, but the particle in the editor sticks to dark or entirely incorrect colors. Then there's the other stuff. Okay, I've got various emitters, operators to act upon existing particles and initial settings for born particles to exhibit... So why the Hell am I having the damnedest time making a decent plume of dust rise out of the ground? I can get it to do the basic motion, but so much of it is wrong. For one thing, even as I change the settings for how long an emitter should create what SHOULD be a stream of particles, it all comes out in one big clump anyway. And even then, I've got no way of making the particles move in a given direction on birth without them starting at a full stop. They're born stopped, and then have to speed up. And somebody tell me how I can alter to the emission radius, so I can at least choose a narrower volume to emit from, if not simply emit from a point and allow me to fan out. This editor just confuses me on so many levels, was this really intended to be convenient in ANY sense? In 3D programs like 3DSMax or Maya, I can pretty methodically get particles to do whatever I need them to do using a simple interface with values that are very telling of what they do given what they were named. In this editor, I'll get an undesirable result from removing an operator in which the values were all zeroed out. What am I missing here? All I want to make are a few simple particles effects. One would be a small plume of dust bursting out of the ground, like a whale expelling air from its blowhole. Another might be ambient dust stirring from a creature blasting out of the ground. I feel I could easily make something like this myself, but I'm constantly fighting this damn editor. Can anyone shed a little extra light on this thing, or offer any other manner of aid?

Small plume of dust: -Smoke texture (use smoke1) -Render: Animated sprites Operators: -Movement basic (gravity: 0 0 -300, play around with that) -Drag: 0.1 (play around) -Alpha fade and decay -Radius Scale (start 0.5, end 1.5) Initializers: -Pos in sphere random (speed in local min: -8 -8 8, max 8 8 64 play around with last number) -Lifetime random (pick good values) -Alpha random -Color random -Radius random -Rotation random -Sequence random (min 0 max 4) Emitter: emit instantaneously (number, play around with it) You can find more here: [url]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Category:Particle_System[/url]

You can look up some tutorials on Youtube to get you started and familiarized with the editor's tools. Or you can open up some existing particles and fiddle with the parameters to see what everything does.

I made myself familiar with the interface. On one boring Saturday morning I decided to start TF2 into tools mode. And now, I'm quite capable of creating believable effects from the ground up. I might get a tutorial up some day, I haven't seen any good ones yet (though I didn't need them).