Question about Ribbons and Meshes

Hello,
I have been working on my team’s University project and during the creation of an Ice FX was started wondering how to create nice curves with textures that flow around or into the player.
I have attempted to create one by using a mesh but it did not work the way I wanted it to. Idk if it’s because my mesh is low poly or the way I set up the curve. I would like to be able to control the timing of the motion, stop the tiling and maybe control the size during the FX.

It was my first time trying something like this and I feel like if I learn how to do it properly it would really improve the quality of my FXs.

Does anybody know where I can find things about this topic or suggestions?

2025-03-30 03-47-36

Hi. This might be what you are looking for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu7sqrO2NUw

Although to learn to setup in UE, you’ll need to pay for the Patreon.

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I think the above video will get you going for sure.

Also pay attention to the UV of your mesh. You mentioned tiling, etc. You will need to add a “texcoord” and multiply your uv values to control tiling.

You can do crazy things with stretched UVs on that mesh so watch that vid, play around with UVs and you’ll be good.

BTW you don’t need Houdini for this, you can use any 3d package, Blender is free. You just need to recreate something akin to what s in the vid, and then pay attention to UVs and use that tiling method in your material.

Instead of having a set parameter for one material you can also use a dynamic parameter and control it in your niagara system.

But it will work either way… good luck!

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Thank You! This is so useful! :raised_hands:

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Uh okay I see! I just learned how to make splines like that on maya. I will deffo look into the dynamic param and play around with the tiling, thank u!

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I also found this video which helped me too

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Stumbling onto this a lil late, but other things that might help:
Disable nanite on your mesh, its enabled by default in Unreal and can give you a real low poly version of your model, instead of what you actually made
Since people already mentioned Dynamic Params here, here’s a useful set up you might want to use to control a ton of stuff on your ribbon:
A) Use a lerp with two parameters to control how far on the X axis your texture scrolls (and then use the slider to go between those two values, so in your material instance, you can use these to make the texture scroll left to right)
B) Scale UVs by center allows you to scale the texture, remember you might need to clamp the texture if you want to go to <1 values
C) Texture plugs into color curve, allows you to have a much higher control over colors by assigning colors to all the values that get input into it

Hope some of this helps!