UE4 PopcornFX Plugin 1.0.0 Released!

Community Showcase Game Development
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Here is the UE4 PopcornFX Plugin v1.0.0 official release:

PopcornFX - PopcornFX

[ul]
[li]Hosted on Github: Sources, SDK, Examples project, issues, etc…
[/li][li]PopcornFX Runtime SDK v1.9.3 for Win32/Win64 (other platforms are on the way)
[/li][li]Tested on Unreal Engine 4.8, 4.9, 4.10, and 4.11
[/li][li]UE4 PopcornFX Examples Project source: Content Examples’ style, you can Download and Test the Win64 packaged build (7-zip file archiver)
[/li][/ul]
Two licenses are available:

[ul]
[li]25€ “Personal” license: per-seat **non-**commercial license: so you can personally learn, test, play, enjoy, even release free art or demos.
[/li][li]250€ “Studio” license: per-seat commercial license: to work and then release your amazing Game with PopcornFX inside !
[/li][/ul]
Within 48h after your order you’ll get your Github access granted, you’ll receive an email to go accept the Github invitation then.

More advanced licensing is available for the PopcornFX Runtime SDK or Support. Contact-us if you need more information.

About PopcornFX:

PopcornFX is a Real-time Particle Solution:

[ul]
[li]The PopcornFX Editor is tailored to create and author PopcornFX particle effects (and it’s free)
[/li][li]The [are the libraries that runs PopcornFX particles into any game engine
[/li][li]And PopcornFX Plugins are the official integrations of the PopcornFX SDK into game engines (such as [url=PopcornFX - PopcornFX]Unreal Engine 4](]PopcornFX C++ SDK[/url) or Unity)
[/li][/ul]
Simply put, our main goal is to give you the maximum flexibility and control over your particles, at the best performance we can do.

You can Contact-us for more information.

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PS: You can do much more than butterflies with PopcornFX, it’s just that 20,000 Butterflies lighted with Fireworks looks particularly good in UE.

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So we already got many enthusiasts, Thank you very much !

Feel free to send us feedback, we would be very glad to get any good and bad impressions on the Plugin: Have you been able to test it ? How was your first “play around” ?
Especially, any ideas to improve the Plugin ? the PopcornFX Examples project ? etc…

For impressions: feel free to post here, or mail us at ue4 at popcornfx dot com.
For Plugin issues, improvements, more specific support on the Plugin: create github repo issues.
For more general PopcornFX questions (eg PopcornFX Editor): you have the answer hub.

We’ll be publishing an install video tutorial soon ! and we’ll try to make more tutos videos for the Plugin !

I’ll just add a few public links here:

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is it possible to pay via PayPal ?

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No, at least for now PayPal is not available, sorry.

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So, what makes PopcornFX different from UE4’s native particles ?

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PopcornFX is more about a lot of particles with cool moves, than a few particle with cool materials. (You could do both if you have the time, and when we’ll plug the material particle nodes (Velocity, Size, Age, etc…))

PopcornFX is about making any behavior you want. You have the “classic” behaviors (Physics, Collisions, Attractors…), but where PopcornFX really makes the difference is with its in-house particle-oriented scripting language, very close to shader syntax: it fells more like having a bunch of cool “particle-oriented tools” to be used the way you want (Basic Shapes, Meshes, Curves, Textures, Spatial Layers…).
As a downside, it also means that the deeper you go, the more technical (as in technical artist) you need to be.

And we put a lot of effort in optimizing the PopcornFX Runtime. So you could not only make butterflies flap and fly the way you want, land the way you want, burn the way you want, but also spawn 20,000 of them with respectable performances (easily quadruple the number if you remove scene collisions/raytrace queries).

That said, in UE, we still have work to optimize the rendering. As much as we already did, UE still does not like very much 400,000 of our sparks flying around. But we are working on it.
And PopcornFX might lack some optimizations for big open worlds. For instance, today, you can only LOD “by hand” in the Effects. Or, we batch so much particles together that it becomes difficult to cull them. But we have already began optimizing for big open worlds use-cases in PopcornFX 1.10.

Also, PopcornFX is a middleware, so (as long as you make them Axis System independent) you can run any PopcornFX Effect in any Game Engine that integrates the PopcornFX Runtime.
And having a standalone PopcornFX Editor, with a big viewport, particle-oritented UI, with a lot of particle debugging and profiling tools, is real plus.

I’ll stop there, but there is a lot of little features here and there that can make the big difference (TwoWay collisions, scene queries, broadcasted events, attribute samplers, future seamless GPU simulation…).

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is there any info about when you will add support for mobile devices in your unreal plugin ?

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Will there be full tutorials on how to create effects like the butterfly and others, if so I will purchase right now.

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Hey, here is the UE4 PopcornFX Plugin Install tutorial video, and Setup tutorial video.

Mobile platforms are planned (like all other platforms except HTML5), they are all kind-of “90%” ready, but we still need to find to time to make the last 10%. We have no ETA, could be next month, or in 4 months.

We really want to make more videos, but we are currently hard working on the next PopcornFX big iteration. So, right now, it means we’ll make videos, but slowly, one after the other.

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do you have any information about popcornfx mobile performance and limitations ? is this GPU base or CPU base ? for example how many particle we can have at a moment on screen in mobile devices?
also it would be nice if you makes more basics video tutorials

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Ok Thanks, unfortunately I cannot buy it until there is documentation on how to do basic effects from scratch. As soon as you release tutorials(so I may use it best) I will purchase it.

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There are already videos that do basics will get you started also there is a whole database you can import which has all the effects they’ve released so far and a few user content, You can break those down.

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I can’t believe this thread isn’t on fire. PopcornFX is like a dream.

I made this thing in like 15 minutes: http://joy-machine.com/blog/particle-wizardry

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Hey, PayPal payment has been enabled ( Realtime Particle Effects Solution )

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Looks very interesting. Currently what data can be passed from a particle to its material?

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Currently only the necessary material inputs/parameters are send to handle all “default” materials: so things like Color, 2 set of texcoord with float interpolant for Atlases (SubUV) when SoftAnimationBlending, float AlphaCursor when AlphaRemap etc… You could hack those existing inputs.

We took a look some time ago to send any PopcornFX Particle Field to any “available” UMaterial input node (like Particle.Size etc…).
But we found some limitations in UE Materials: like knowing which UMaterial node is used to build the vertex stream only then. (well, maybe not limitations, but did not seemed trivial at the time)
But it’s definitively on the TODO list, but no ETA.

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Alright, cool, it should be okay if I can assign arbitrary data to UVs and vertex colors in the PopcornFX editor.
Another thing: In the UE4 demo application I noticed particle system culling problems, they are removed too soon. Is it still an issue with 1.0?

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Currently, you will not be able send custom UVs (they are automatically build), and you can only send 1 color per particle. But in the future you will be able to.

About the demo application (I guess the PopcornFX Example project) and culling issues, no worry:

  • if you’re experiencing “full screen” “all particles” flickering, this might be due to an experimental option that should not have been enabled (Project Settings > PopcornFX > Render Settings > EnableEarlyFrameRelease should have been disabled).

  • if the culling issue is on the “Particle Renderers” example, it’s kind of a corner-case bug: only due because each single particle is rendered 5 times with different renderers and a position offset, and BBoxes are computed only with the original particle position (without the offset). This use-case is very specific, we should fix it, but 99% of the effects are not made like this.

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Ah I see! Thank you for the answers, I’ll give PFX a try!

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Hello,

Merci pour le payement via Paypal.

J’ai fait deux video pour la communauté Française.