Making Duplicates in Niagara?

General Discussion
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#1

Hi all. I’m very new to making VFX and I have 2 questions.

  1. I don’t know exactly how to ask this, but basically I want to make an instance of a certain effect in Niagara. I don’t know if I do that in the Emitter or System, because the only way I can think of doing it currently is making multiple of the same emitter and tweaking a few values like size, color, etc for each one. Keep in mind all these Emitters will be put into 1 Niagara System for my effect when finished.

2)Does it matter what axis I build a Particle effect on ( like will using the Y axis in the emitter/system make in spawn in the Player’s forward direction, or does it not matter?

Thank you for any help/advice in advance.

#2

1a - If you want to use the same emitter multiple times, consider adding that emitter as a preset, similar to other Niagara templates. This allows for easy reuse and consistency across different projects or scenes.
1b - If you plan to reuse a Niagara System, expose the necessary parameters to tweak it later. This flexibility allows for adjustments without having to recreate the system from scratch.
1.c - Most of the time, it’s more efficient to work within the Niagara System rather than creating individual emitters. However, once you have fine-tuned your emitters, consider saving them as presets. This can significantly boost your workflow by allowing quick access to pre-configured emitters for future projects.
2. Yes, axes are important for your effects. Sometimes you want to use local space or world space. For example, if you attach your blood effect and the direction is behind the object, but you don’t know the direction when the object rotates, you should set your blood effect’s direction to local space and specify the axis. Hope that makes sense.

#3

2: I typically us the +X as the “forward” or “outward” facing vector. I feel liek this is an UE method for most thing.

Echoing @donkeyt131, it helps if you pick one and keep it uniform for the project, as you don’t want system that wortk with specific alignment getting an effect with the a differing coordinate system.

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#4
  • System,
    • emitters,
      • modules,
        these are different levels.
        Therefore, if the task is to use an effect with different colours, shapes, etc. on the level or in the blueprints, then you need to use the user parameters for the Niagara system.
        If we are talking about optimization at the level of emitters, then the use of instances of emitters in the system or even different Niagara systems is logical, since the use of the same modules in instances of emitter saves memory and the compilation time of the Niagara system.
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#5

As for the axis direction, it is not required, but it serves as an example of a good tone of creation effect. This saves time for setting up effects, especially during debugging.