Final Fantasy Style transparent particles

Anchang-Style

Hey people,
i would like to know how you would approach those particle effects from the (especially the most recent) final fantasy games. All the transparent effects that appear when you activate magic.
Stuff like those effects:
http://final-fantasy-future.de/cms/images/stories/news/190210/final_fantasy_xiii_360_10.jpg
http://final-fantasy-future.de/cms/images/stories/news/170210/xbox8.jpg
http://www.playstationfuture.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Final-Fantasy-XIII-3.jpg

I guess 2D Planes with Textures and alphas? but how to get the Texture to animate? are there certain Plugins or apps to help doing that? I guess you need to use the inengine Particle system too. Any little clue or hint is deeply appreciated.

Ace-Angel

What application are you aiming for?

Anchang-Style

I would like to try to get them to look sort of Final Fantasy like in UDK or CE3. So yeah realtime application.

Will Faucher

That kind of stuff is done with the in-engine particle editor. It's very engine-dependant, so do some research about it. Not sure what it's called in CE3, but in UDK, it's called "Unreal Cascade". There's lots of documentation available.

Anchang-Style

Ah ok, i thought it might be some stuff done in Texture department. But good to know thanks will read into Cascade, Kismet and so on. Thanks a lot. Iam just preparing some stuff directed at JRPG style visuals so iam checking out before what can be done without TOO much coding ^^

Ace-Angel

I would avoid UDK if you don't want to code anything, try Unity if you want to avoid such stuff.

bugo

I think most of that stuff on the screenshots are frame animated particles. Easier to plan, requires more texturing but less processing.

Anchang-Style

It's not that i dont want (or can't...or can't learn whats necessary but coding and debugging in my projects usually turns out in 20 hour sittings fixing lists because forgetting re referncing^^).
@Bugo could you give me a ressource to get an idea of how that works...right now i just can imagine to render Particle Systems to a plane and pack them as "sprites".

bugo

I think that's exactly what you want. You need to atlas them and on the code side get them to play frame by frame. 4x4 = 16 frames, 3x3 = 9 frames or whatever you think your animation would work better. Yes they will still be planes/sprites, they could be facing the camera all the time or not, depending on what your purpose is, but the particle itself will be animated.

Like this: http://loewald.com/waterboy/shrapnel_example.jpg

To get them animated that way, you could render them with any application, like Maya/Max. Unity and their community have some good atlasing tools.