Hit tab
The burst at the end: the flash, ring or explosion that fires when the coin lands. It is the payoff of the whole effect, and it is off until you ask for it.
Show pot hit is unchecked by default, on purpose: no hit unless you want one. If nothing happens when your coin lands, this is the first thing to check.
A hit layer is a sparkle layer locked to a burst, so the picture, Transform, blend mode, curves and every force behave exactly as on the Sparks tab. What is unique here is the presets, when the burst fires, and where from.
Presets
Hit preset - loads a ready-made burst into this layer: picture, forces, curves, count and blend mode all at once.
Start from a preset every time. Getting an explosion from scratch out of fifteen force sliders is work; nudging one that already reads as an explosion is minutes.
Your own uploaded picture is kept when you load a preset. Everything else is replaced.
The six presets:
- Shockwave ring - one ring that expands and fades. The classic impact.
- Soft flash - a single bright bloom, gone in a few frames.
- Spark explosion - many small sparks in all directions.
- Fountain (up and fall) - thrown upward, pulled back down by gravity.
- Confetti drift - slow, wide, floating.
- Ring of sparks - sparks fired evenly around a circle.
Real impacts are layered: a flash on the first frame, a ring expanding behind it, sparks flying out. Three hit layers with Hit delay at 0, 0.02 and 0.05 seconds read as one solid hit rather than three separate events.
When it fires
One dropdown, but it shows different options per journey, because a coin flight, a win line and an atmospheric or flow item have different interesting moments.
Hit fires at (Coins mode) - Landing (out) fires from the target pot as the coin arrives. Launch (in) fires from the source point as it takes off. Launch and landing does both.
Launch and landing, with a small quiet puff at launch and the real burst at landing, makes a coin feel like it was thrown rather than spawned.
Hit fires at (Win lines mode) - Line start, Line end (the default), Line ends (both), or First 3 / First 4 / All symbols, which fires on each symbol as the head passes it, on the first pass only.
"First 3" is the classic slot presentation: the line lights up each winning symbol as it reaches it.
With Direction set to ping-pong, a hit at the line end fires back at the first symbol, because that is where the pass actually ends.
Hit fires at (Atmospheric and Flow) - Death (out) fires where an item ends its life, at the moment it is replaced. Birth (in) fires where it appears. Birth and death does both.
A bubble that pops at the surface is a hit layer at Death with a small ring. A drop that splashes on the ground is Death with the zone's bottom at the ground line. In a flow, Birth with a small flash puts a spark on the lamp's spout every time a puff comes out.
Any hit layer on the items caps Count at 24 in the Atmospheric journey and 60 in the Flow journey. Mute it to see the full field again. Items with Infinite life are never born or replaced, so they fire nothing.
Hit delay (per layer) - how long this layer waits after the landing before it fires.
Stagger your layers by 20-60 ms. Simultaneous is rarely what an impact looks like.
Where it fires from
Origin offset X / Y (the folded section at the bottom) - moves the burst away from the pot centre, in screen pixels. Negative Y is up.
If your pot art is a chimney or a chest, the burst should come from its opening, not from the middle of the picture. That is what this is for.
The red cross showing the origin is only drawn on the board while that section is open, so it never gets in your way afterwards. The offset applies to every burst, including the launch one.
[hit_01 - The Hit tab, panel width: Show pot hit ticked, the Hit fires at dropdown, and one hit layer card with its preset dropdown visible. Red box around the Hit fires at dropdown.]
Particle count
Particle count - how many pictures are fired per landing. Use 1 for a single ring or flash.
A hit fires on every landing. Fifteen coins landing with 80 particles each is 1200 pictures in a fraction of a second - check it with Launch All and the F8 display, not with one coin.
Hit layers do not use up your four sparkle layers - they have their own four.
[hit_02 - Stage crop around one pot, about 900 px, three frames of the same hit in a row: the flash, the burst, the ring expanding. Small "1 2 3" labels under each frame.]