Best approach to spawn liquid VATs in Niagara?

Hello I want to make a 3D blood splash, I’ve been trying different techniques but nothing works, I’m getting really desperate.

I tried alembic from liquigen - it’s expensive, can’t get liquigen to not create tons of small details and more importantly in UE I can’t seem to control the playrate of the alembic.

I tried VATs in Houdini - after a ton of tutorials and everything, my VAT splash won’t render/play when I add it to Niagara mesh renderer. I changed the transform nodes in the MF from Local to Instance/Particle and still nothing.

I’m running out of ideas and it doesn’t seem to be a lot of information on the internet. The client wants these blood splashes 3D, otherwise I’d do a flipbook and call it a day three days ago.

Hope this helps >