I am pretty new to UE5, and got myself hitting the wall pretty quickly.
To put it short, I am basically trying to recreate this:
I have buildings and stuff but I can’t wrap my head around on creating that far away street lights/ car lights, and I want them to be animated, moving and flicker too…
I am currently looking at particle systems (how I would usually create this in any 3d software) but still unsure. I am sure this will need blueprints to move along the axis and flciker at random intervals…
This idea reminds me of an old sample project. Specifically, the way the cars are implemented. (Geometric plane with a panning material) But unless you’re trying to optimize for mobile there are many other techniques.
Using particles seems like a good path forward. You’d be able to animate/flicker them, plus having thousands of particles would be more performant than thousands of Blueprints.
If you’re only viewing the city from far away, you may be able to get away with a texture for the lights. (Feed the lights into the emissive material channel) Same for the lights in the windows. There’s also ways to make the lights flicker in materials.
Interested to see how this evolves. The idea of viewing city lights from a mountainside is near and dear to my heart.
This certainly gave me some few ideas on moving forward! I had a look around youtube on searching simple particle tutorials but all of them were about physics and vfx…
May I ask which tutorial would be best suitable for it?
I think the first step would be a general understanding of particles. (How to spawn them, let them persist, blink them, add movement to them) and then (based on the image you posted) a method/algorithm for spawning them. (So you don’t have to manually place each one)
I don’t have any specific tutorial to point you to, but there are maps that show Niagara’s features in the Content Examples project.
Another idea I had would be to use the new Procedural Generation Tools to drive placement. (Using meshes/Blueprints instead of particles would still be on the table at this point)
thanks for the advise! I tried to look in the the examples and took them apart to see what works what and also gave some read on the official documents as well.
and that procedural generation tool looks so useful to place multiple buildings on the fly!
