Spawning Impacts on collision using Niagara

Hey Guys so, I am very new to VFX but I am getting to grips with Niagara and how it works quite nicely now and I wanted to test myself by trying to achieve an impact of sorts for when a particle hits a surface.

I have achieved this using knowledge gained from a combination of tutorials and essentially all I am doing is generating a collision event for when the moving particle hits a surface, and then using that collision event in the impact emitter to spawn my impact sprite with the alignment set to whichever axis it is on. I have two questions about this though…

  • I want to create good habits since I am early into my VFX journey and want to make it a career so, is this a good approach to something like this?

  • I want to be able to have this effect work properly on multiple surfaces so, I’m not really sure where to go from here.

Thanks in advance! I look forward to hearing from you all!

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“I want to create good habits since I am early into my VFX journey and want to make it a career so, is this a good approach to something like this?”

Yeah, this is a fair way to go about getting particles to spawn for something like decals. From a technical stand point, you don’t have to use a second emitter, but could have render flags be driven from collision events.

I put together a responce to something similar question someone else had before. As far as, best practices, I think this is a pretty good method and you’ll get alignment on the surfaces at the end of the day.

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Thank you for your reply! I opted to not use scratch modules at the moment as I am still super new to VFX and don’t want to be touching stuff like that if I can help it. I ended up getting help from my teammate to solve it by getting the rotator from z in the weapon bp we are using for our game and then that helps orient the effect as it uses the collision normal.
I appreciate your response!

Glad you found a solution, but you shouldn’t shy away from scratch pads/niagara modules, as your learning will be coming to an end shortly.

Keep up the effort and good luck.

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No problem, thank you! I love Niagara and I’m really feeling like the modules are a breeze to use, I’d just never heard of scratch pads before…

I’ll look into scratch pads for sure, thank you sir!