I’m trying to spawn an animated mesh in Niagara.
I’ve modeled, rigged, and animated a butterfly in Blender and imported it into the Unreal Engine 5. I figured it would be as easy as using a Mesh Renderer in Niagara and attaching an animation to it. This was not the case.
If anyone has any information on this, I’d surely appreciate it! : )
There’s a few option, but may I suggest simply animation using sines and masks:
https://twitter.com/Niels_Dewitte/status/1708701063644348652
Eric A Anderson on YouTube kinda explained how to do rotating WPO without VAT. Epic already provides a default rotator for material graph, so you don’t actually need to build a custom function like Eric did, unless you want to do some very complicated hierarchical rotation and recalculate the normal.
Here’s the solution I came to after working on it for a while.
I’m not sure how the image will look on the forum. (noob poster)
I started with a simple gradient, with black on either side of the horizontal gradient (due to mesh orientation | could’ve been vertical.) After adding a power node to darken the edges, I multiplied by 0.75 to reduce the overall lightness of the image. Then, I inverted the grayscale of the gradient image and added a power node increase of 3 to darken the inverted gradient.
Once I had both gradients created, I applied a lerp node and input both the final inverted gradient and the original modified gradient. In the alpha of the lerp node, I connected my Dynamic Material Parameter, set the default value to zero, and multiplied it by 50. After the lerp node was created I multiplied the result by a Vertex Normal WS.
This yielded a result I was happy with, but I wanted the edges of the wings to taper a little more to make it feel like it had more flow.
To achieve a little more taper on the edge of the wings, I multiplied the output by the inverted gradient and plugged it into the world offset node.
The final result is spent fiddling in Niagara, here is the end.
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Thanks for the help, I got what I was looking for. I’m going to have to do research on how to maintain image quality and keep it below 4MB. Hopefully this can help someone else who might be having the same problem I was.
