My first effect (needing some help)

Hey everyone!

I wanted to get some help with my first effect here. Its a WIP, but theres just a few problems that I have been pulling my hair out to solve:

https://imgur.com/a/lcfWqFa

First, you can see that the ring just pops in. I’ve been trying to get the ring to fade in using a dynamic material and a scalar attached to the opacity, however no matter what I’ve tried in my blueprint, it doesn’t seem to work. A Dean Ashford tutorial showed me this method. There is also some delay on the spawn of the ring in the particle system, which I dont know how to fix.

Also it seems that i’m unable to turn on shadows for the debris for an emitter that is spawned through a blueprint? There doesn’t seem to be any shadow parameters for the “spawn emitter at location” node

Any help or critique is appeciated! Thanks in advance