Partikels UE4 Niagara Quicktips

Hey everyone! For a while I’ve been making super short Niagara tips. Mostly as a response to frequently asked questions on discord. I find it’s easier to show, rather than tell. At least over and over again :smiley:
Some of them are quite specifc, others are just gernerally nice things to know. Nothing revolutionary here. Just small nuggets of info that might help someone. I figured I’d collect them all in one thread for easy searchability.

First up is the latest upload: Weighted Random

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Controling texture panning/scrolling speed over particle life.

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Connectiong two joints with a beam

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Rotating velocity aligned sprites, or controlling which side is “forward”.

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Adding trails to parentparticles.

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Randomly selecting a renderer per particle. For meshes this can be done with a mesh array since 4.27 but this method is still valid for sprites.

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Figured I’d sneak this one in as well. It’s not a short quicktip, but an overview of how to get started with Grid2d. This already has a thread dedicated to it if you want to catch up on the discussion: Niagara Grid2d quickstart

Part 1:

Part 2:

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These are easily the best and most straight to the point tutorials or guides out there for Niagara.

Niagara is still at a point where you can’t find a proper tutorial for something simple without having
to scroll through 30min of completely unrelated or unnecessary content.

Very much appreciate these tutorials, hope to see more in the future.

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Got an interesting question on discord so I decided to record my reply. It did get a bit more complex and a bit longer than I intend for the quicktips and should probably have been a regular tutorial, but I live and learn :slight_smile:
Sequential Force (First step towards a spline force)

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Here’s a tip for the fishlovers out there! Check if a particle moves outside a boundary, then send it back. Works with any mathematically defined shape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOjsPv8dPvM

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You could use sticky collision to a ton of things, but yeah the first things that comes to mind is blood splatter, isn’t it.
But remember, you could use this as a way to distribute parent particles in the scene to use as emission points. Some pretty cool effects lie that way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDrGRf55MP0

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Another one! Fixing that pesky gap between the ribbon and the emitter. At least one way of doing it.

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The UDK lensflare editor may be gone, but now we have Niagara which makes us more powerful than ever :stuck_out_tongue:

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This might be my best one yet. GOOGLY EYES!

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A bit more serious this time. (A bit.)
Setting up an NPC to send the player position to Niagara for all kinds of fun shenanigans.

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Partikel, you rock!
These quicktips are really helping me with experimentation and building more gameplay integrated effects.
The sequential forces + playerposition videos in special are giving me ideas on how to setup some cool homing projectiles without being constrained to the real projectile.

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