Today I worked on improving the reentry and visual effects system for my Unity project, focusing mainly on making the atmosphere interaction feel more cinematic and less “flat prototype.” I spent time testing how the particle system behaves during high-speed descent, especially around the point where the object hits the upper atmosphere. The initial version was too abrupt — the effect would briefly show particles and then disappear, which completely killed the sense of momentum and scale.
I experimented with smoothing the transition using gradual intensity changes instead of instant triggers. I also adjusted local offsets and rotation values to better align the effect with the object’s trajectory, since some of the transforms were behaving inconsistently between the inspector and runtime. That took a bit of debugging because some values were being overridden or reset in unexpected ways.
After that, I started exploring how to push the visuals further toward a “glowing plasma cone” look, with stronger edge concentration and a softer fade into the surrounding atmosphere. I also began looking into Visual Effect Graph as a possible upgrade path for more advanced GPU-driven effects. Overall, it was a day of fixing broken motion, improving visual flow, and pushing the system closer to something cinematic rather than purely functional.