I can’t seem to find any way to feed an array of bytes or float to Niagara, besides using a Texture as a mean of communication, which is quite expensive and not the right tool for the task. I have a set of depth information that I have to use as particle position, and I can’t see any docs about how to do that. I tried to see about grid collection, but little to no documentation exists about that either.
I also tried using a Texture, but that was way to crappy performance. But you can use the HoudiniNiagara plugin for this if the data you want to pass is static. You can create a csv file (.hcsv) or json file (.hjson) with the data you want to pass to Niagara, and it sets the positions of the particles from that data.
Csv file is easiest, but deprecated. It works with the plugin shipped with UE4, but when I try with the latest HoudiniNiagara plugin the editor just keeps crashing.
A csv file with positions should have the file ending hcsv, and contain data like this:
Age,Color.R,Color.G,Color.B,Color.A,Lifetime,Mass,NormalizedAge,Position.X,Position.Y,Position.Z,Scale.X,Scale.Y,Scale.Z,SpriteRotation,SpriteSize.X,SpriteSize.Y,UniqueID,UV.X,UV.Y
1.927283883,0.156372070,0.172851563,0.215942383,3276.000000000,1.984626651,1.000000000,0.971106529,3276.000000000,467.075164795,551.732421875,1.000000000,1.000000000,1.000000000,0.000000000,5.000000000,5.000000000,801229,0.454353273,0.463295281
1.894273877,0.167358398,0.186889648,0.236694336,2546.000000000,1.979573131,1.000000000,0.956910312,2546.000000000,567.797302246,68.220954895,1.000000000,1.000000000,1.000000000,0.000000000,5.000000000,5.000000000,807831,0.552331984,0.933637202
1.845345974,0.459960938,0.684082031,0.679687500,250.500000000,1.987711668,1.000000000,0.928377032,250.500000000,155.868026733,644.913635254,1.000000000,1.000000000,1.000000000,0.000000000,5.000000000,5.000000000,817617,0.151622593,0.372652113
1