Hope you are all having a great week!
I’m getting ready for autumn, working on a rain weather system, and I’m struggling with turning the footsteps on and off in accordance with the rain and could use some help T_T
I want a little water splash to come up when it’s raining and stop when it’s not raining. Which really doesn’t sound that crazy - but I have been banging my head on it for about two weeks. I looked at some tutorials online but they always have the same weather So I figure I could really use the eyes of the smart cookies here at real-time VFX.
The spawn rate rain is working so I assume it’s the burst nature of my emitter that’s causing the problem - somehow it doesn’t acknowledge that the index has changed - is there a way around this? Alternatively, I might have the wrong idea all together and need to change setup entirely. Has anyone set up a footstep system before and figured out how to alter it’s output depending on what’s happening in a blueprint? Would really appreciate people’s experiences, thoughts, and ideas on tackling this one.
Your Weather NS system gets spawned once with Spawn System Attached and never gets destroyed, so it’s basically one Niagara instance that just lives for the whole level. When your footstep event fires, you’re not spawning anything new, you’re just poking a new value into Footstep_index on that same instance that’s been running the whole time. Problem is Spawn Burst Instantaneous only checks its spawn count once, right when that instance starts (your Spawn Time is 0, Loop Count Limit is 1). So it got its one shot ages ago and it’s done, it doesn’t care that you changed the parameter afterward, there’s nothing left for it to react to.
Honestly I’d just spawn a fresh system per footstep instead of trying to reuse the persistent one. Use Spawn System at Location (not Attached) on the footstep notify and feed it the foot socket location/rotation at that moment. Attached is really for stuff that needs to keep following a moving bone the whole time it’s alive, like your rain on the camera. A splash should just plant itself where the foot hit and not drag along as the leg lifts back up. At Location also just auto destroys when it’s done playing, way less to manage.
And once you’re spawning a new one each step, the burst thing just works, since every new spawn gets its own fresh evaluation at time 0. You could honestly ditch the whole Footstep_index array setup at that point and just check “is it raining” in blueprint before you even call the spawn, way simpler.
Hey iNoob, really appreciate your explanation! Thank you so much <3
I will figure out how to implement what you suggested and hopefully I’ll soon come back with stories of great success!!
So I figure I could really use the eyes of the smart cookies here at real-time VFX.