I have an object that is animated via Sequencer, think of it as a simple artillery shell that arcs into the distance.
I need to draw an arc from the starting point to the end point, and via gameplay input allow the player to toggle this effect on/off.
At present there is a simple Ribbon Emitter assigned to the animated mesh that works relatively well.
However it only draws for about 1/4 of the arc and I have yet to find a setting that gives me the entire length.
Max Particle in Trail Count only seems to work up to a point unless I am missing something.(?)
Are Ribbon Emitters really the best way to do something like this? I am concerned that the way to get the entire arc traced via Ribbon Emitter will not be very efficient as far as number of particles. Using particle systems for what is essentially a bit of UI seems like overkill.
have you tried using spline meshes for that? not sure if it will work with sequencer as i have not messed with that at all, but i can’t think of a reason why it shouldn’t.
I’ll look into that now, thanks. I always thought that was for roads/rivers/static meshes. I don’t necessarily need to animate the arc via Sequencer but it seemed the easiest way.
Hopefully I can animate a mesh expanding down the length of the spline arc…somehow.
I followed Dan Elliot’s excellent tutorial on SplineMesh components which generally gives me what I am looking for.
In my case, I replaced the plane with a cylinder and drew out the appropriate arc.
I don’t see any way to draw the mesh objects along the spline sequentially though so it follows the object through the arc. I am trying to reverse engineer the BP_Spline_Mesh_Animated example now but this is new territory for me.
you could definitely use the index of the spline meshes along the spline to control a parameter in the material and animate the visibility through that - not only on a per-mesh basis, but for a smooth gradient inside the individual meshes.
would be somewhat involved, but totally doable.