Cascade - Surface Only for Cylinder module not working

Development Asset Creation FX
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1

Seems to be happening on 4.16 up until latest. (example uses 4.16)

Set up an emitter like you normally would.
spawn to burst, spawn quite a few in burst mode to see the problem better.
add cylinder location module.
Disable negative and positive Z.
Activate surface only.

result:

While same settings for sphere module still work like they should:

This basically breaks any emitter using surface-only cylinder locations in 4.16 and up.
Regardless of Niagara this is something that should be fixed. right?

Since this happens in 4.16 up to 4.18 and influences marketplace packages, client works, games packages on 4.16 and up I highly suggest to fix this in 4.16 and up.

Edit: Alex from realtimevfx discord suggested to use a height distribution of 1, which works as a workaround.
This was never the case in previous versions though.

2

Hi Luos,

The surface area of a cylinder is A=2πrh+2πr2. When you remove the Positive and Negative Z spawn directions as well as set the height to 0 for the cylinder, you are left with just a flat emitter spawning in the XY plane (the surface area of a circle).

I’ve tested the issue in 4.15, 4.16, 4.17, and 4.18 and it is working as intended. It sounds like Alex’s suggestion is just the correct way to do it, rather than a “workaround.”

3

You are totally right, I even went back to 4.1 to check it out.
I guess I got it extremely confused with the sphere radius, and also compared it to that module and considered it a bug instead of how it should have behaved.

thanks for clearing that up.