FINAL :
Niagara Shield with player and projectile impact interaction
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Ref :
-https://www.pinterest.com/nielsdewitte35/vfx-ref-inspiration-エフェクト/shield/
-MR_Pol: Shetch #16
-General plasma ball images and videos
15 Likes
Some progress on the impact effect.
13 Likes
This is so cool 
Do you render the impacts over the shield with mesh particles or is it rendered into the shield shader ?
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@Sorangon
Mesh particles.
I’m restricting myself to not building any custom behavior into the material for these challenges.
So everything is made using just 2 base materials (the basic FX material, and a decal one)
That being said, it is perfectly possible to have multiple impacts rendered in the same material, it’s a bit troublesome to pass on the points, and you need a custom node to iterate over it, but besides that the basic flow is the same.
2 Likes
Looks really cool 
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FINAL :
- Cleaned up player interaction
- Added camera shake
- Minor final adjustments.
8 Likes
I always had an impression that stacking multiple decal meshes this way will kill the performance. But looks like it works fine. It’s in Additive mode?
Looks impressive.
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There are only 2 meshes here that function as decals.
The impacts are always spheres, so I just align their size with the main sphere, no projection required.
Are you detecting the collision in a blueprint outside the niagara system or in the system itself? The impacts look great!
Collision Detection is BP as you suspect
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Hey! Awesome work!
One thing tho, how do you trigger multi pulses on the sphere when hit? I mean it should just read one pulse at one time and if there’s another hit at a different location it will just forget the previous pulse and emit new pulse?
@Jukerlaw
Collision detection is in bp.
It gathers impacts, and submits them to an array which gets sent to Niagara.
In niagara I’m using that array to spawn a set of spheres on which the pulses are rendered.
2 Likes
Awesome, thanks. Can you show me how you set it up in Niagara? I have been bothered by this issue quite a while 
Appreciated.
p/s: Btw there should be an array in the material doesn’t it? I don’t quite understand how it works yet.
No, I’m spawning a mesh per pulse, so the material doesn’t need the array.
(Although it is possible to do it like that as well if you want to write a little bit of custom code)
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That’s a very cool approach, also makes the standard shield material less expensive with the complexity of the impact effects being outsourced to another mesh and material.
I did it the other way around and allow two impacts at the same time with the older one being restarted on the third strike. A lot of overhead though since it needs two separate impact animations in the standard shield shader. Could be useful on more custom shield shapes though…
Btw, amazing work @Niels!
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I mostly went for this approach because I wanted to challenge myself to finding a solution that would work with only my default set of master materials.
It’s really fun because it forced me to think about ways to creatively use Niagara instead.
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