Exhaust Flash

ExhaustFlash inspector.

ExhaustFlash Effect is used to imitate flames shooting out of exhaust. The method to achieve this is identical to the one used for most muzzle flash in FPS games; that is a set of images gets enabled and disabled at rapid rate with different sprite and scale each time. This is a performant way to achieve the effect while avoiding particle effects.

• Create and place two Quads perpendicular to each other. Move them to the location of the exhaust.
• Remove any colliders from Quads.
• Create a new material that uses Particles/Standard Unlit (Unity 2019) or equivalent shader with Transparent rendering and Multiply color mode. The included example on Sports Car prefab can be copied. Assigning one of the included flame textures will show if the rotation of the Quad is correct. Rotate Quad if needed.

Two perpendicular quads with flame sprites.

• Assign the MeshRenderers from the newly created Quads to the ExhaustFlash ⇒ Mesh Renderers list.

To make flames look more convincing a random texture is assigned to each Quad on each flash. A number of default textures is included.

• Assign textures to Flash Textures list.

Flash Textures list.

If the material used for exhaust flash is not emisive adittional PointLight(s) can be added to light the surrounding area on flash.

• Set up a PointLight and place it at the exhaust location.
• After configuring, disable the light.
• Add the light to the Flash Lights list.

Flash Lights list.