Assistance with Niagara Mesh Particle Orientation in Unreal Engine 5.3

I’ve been searching extensively online but have not found a solution to a specific issue I’m encountering in Unreal Engine 5.3 using the Niagara system.

In my setup, a mesh particle spawns at the center of an object upon its death. This is triggered via a generated death event, which launches a second mesh particle into the air that lands on a surface. Upon landing, this particle triggers a collision event, which then spawns a third mesh particle in an idle static state.

The issue is with this third mesh particle: it always faces the X-axis by default, rather than orienting in the direction the second (jumping) particle was traveling. My goal is to simulate a creature performing a series of five directional jumps, and for this to appear natural, the mesh needs to inherit the direction of travel from the previous particle before it dies.

I would greatly appreciate any guidance on how to achieve this behavior—specifically, how to pass or inherit the direction of travel using the Niagara event handler system.

Thank you in advance for your support.

Also had this issue recently in 5.3. Have yet to find a solution.

Hey there @SADraco and @AerixArtGames! Welcome back to the community! I’m not extremely well versed with Niagara, but if there is no way to inherit the velocity natively, have you looked into grabbing the value out of Scratch Pad and then using that value for the initial rotation value of the 2nd particle?

Thank you for reply any example of what you mean been looking to find any info but found noting

Hi @SADraco @AerixArtGames,

This is how I would accomplish it:



Basically, inherit a small version of the original particle’s velocity, use the velocity to orient the mesh, then set the velocity to 0.

If you are not using a mesh and instead a sprite, this gets a lot more complicated. You will still need to use this method to get the velocity, but then you will have to manually change the transforms to get the correct orientation method, since sprites have their own weird transforms, which will be a pain. If this is what you need, let me know and I can help you out.