Hi everyone!
I would like to replicate the rotational motion of this particle. In particular the rotating inwards motion and the “rotation trail” behind the 2 “balls”. Anyone that has an idea on how to approach this or knows of any useful tutorials, please let me know. Thank you in advance!
I could see a couple general approaches.
If you wanted to keep this all in Niagara, you could make your emitter(s) shape location be offset in X/Y over time with two sin waves offset to make a circle pattern. From there, you could adjust their progress along that circle (and the size of the circle) with curves over time.
It might also be possible, and maybe easier, to animate the two converging points in your 3d app of choice (blender/maya/etc) and then attach a separate system to each. I used to do stuff like this in Unity frequently, a mix of hand animated stuff and particle assets, but haven’t tried it Unreal… unsure if you can easily get some animated joints into Unreal without a whole skeletal mesh.
I managed to get the circular motion on 2 spheres with the “Rotate Around Point” module, but I’m struggling to get the spiraling trail behind it. Any idea on how to tackle that?
You could have those two particles create location events, and then another emitter in the system could read those to spawn particles, ribbons, etc. That’s the usual way to make particles act like moving emitters. If you haven’t done this before, this video might be handy - it’s from UE4, but the gist of it is unchanged in UE5.
Your reference has a few different trailing elements - there’s thin bright ribbons moving in a swirl, and more wispy, misty particles as well (or maybe that’s a ribbon too, hard to tell). It’d take a few emitters to create a similar result.
I’ve done a similar effect and to have really close control over it, I made two scratch nodes: one that controls the rotation and one that controls distance from the center. Then I can define curves for both and tweak as needed.