ModularParticle

The ModularParticle is a particle process material plugin for Godot 4.

Its design goals are ease-of-use, visual clarity and fast workflow. Godot's default ParticleProcessMaterial is very powerful, but it can extremely frustrating to scroll back-and-forth constantly to find the setting you are looking for. With ModularParticleMaterial, you can see what your particle is doing at a glance, and get to whatever setting you need within moments. But why talk about it when I can just show you? 

In this clip, you can see ModularParticleParameter in action. When you set any given property of your particle, you'll have different approaches. For instance, you may want to set the initial size of your particles to a constant value, a random number or sample it from a curve. The parameter class brings these options together, combining artistic freedom with ease-of-use.

ModularParticle has over 30 built-in modules. These modules cover most of what you'd want to do with particles and I myself have created hundreds of visual effects during the year I've been working on this plugin. That said, creating new modules is incredibly easy. In Godot, a particle process material is essentially a particle shader code generator. By creating your own modules, you can do whatever you can do with a custom particle shader. The difference is that you only need to do this once, and you can use that module forever through the interface. Built-in modules are the accumulation of months of iteration building visual effects and creating features when needed.

More about this plugin

• Built for Godot 4.6. While it may work in earlier versions of the engine, it hasn't been tested.
• Built for GPUParticles3D. It may work with GPUParticles2D with some tweaks work but not tested.
• This plugin is meant to be used during development. Once you're done with your effect, you can convert ModularParticleMaterial to ShaderMaterial with one click. Once converted to ShaderMaterial, it can be exported as part of your game or distributed as assets without requiring the plugin. It's recommended to retain a separate copy of your effect as a "source" version so that you can continue to make changes in the future if necessary.
• Most modules are self explanatory, you can guess what they do simply from module and parameter names. On the rare occasion that a module appears confusing, you can simply read its script to figure out exactly what it's doing.
• This plugin is in active development. If you find a feature that's missing, find a bug or have any question regarding the plugin, feel free to reach out to me by creating a topic down below.
• This plugin comes with an example project. When you first open an example scene, materials may not be yet built. Simply click on the process material and that will build all materials in the scene.

Bonus plugin: Particle Shader Generator!

One of my biggest complaints about Godot is that many settings that should be overridable through a material is hard-coded into the shader. The fact that texture sampling options is among these settings greatly reduces the re-usability of these shaders. This is especially true for when creating particle shaders (spatial shaders made for particles). This plugin is my workaround for this problem. For simpler use cases, I can generate the exact shader code that I need. For more complex shaders, it's great as a base shader to work with.