I’ve been working on a project where I need to create a thick paint trail effect behind the character and weapon whenever they do an attack, similar texture to the picture attached. It also needs to take on the same color as the material. I have messed around with ribbon trails, and particles in Niagara, but it just doesn’t have that feeling. I come from a Houdini VFX background, and have been slowly learning Unreal but don’t have enough unreal knowledge to confidentially approach this. With the weapon, I was able to get the ribbon trail to look like I want it to look like, but don’t get that thickness of more paint in a spot, plus I’m not sure how to get a ribbon to take on the material of the weapon.
For the character, I’m at a loss as to where to go. I’ve tried particles, and while I’ve gotten it to take on the material, I can’t figure out how to get it to look like the style I want it to. The particles feel almost fur and really shiny like in a weird way. I’ve attached a screenshot of what I’ve got so far.
Any advice or help would be appreciated immensely!
Hi @Ghostwarrior087, let me see if I can help you out here!
Well, it seems like you’ve already got the hard part figured out.
I’m assuming you’re using the method from the Unreal Content Examples- where you use the Mesh Reproduction Sprite and the same texture as your character and use the dynamic parameters to set the particle UVs.
To get your trails to look more like paint, I would suggest playing around with the material some more. Something like this should give you better results (replacing the solid colors with your textures):
To avoid a hard material change where your player ends and your particles begin, I would consider tying the value changes to a lerp, with the alpha being set via Dynamic Parameter as the particle’s normalized lifetime. This should give the effect of older particles looking more paint-like, and creating a nice blend into the original character.
As for the ribbon trail, yeah that’s more difficult. Since you’re only going to have one particle here, you can’t use the normal methods for mesh sampling. I would offer two possible suggestions here:
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Set your paint color as a simple color. This will be the easiest solution, and with an object as simple as this in color, it won’t make a difference. You can hard-set this value through blueprints if you need to change the color per weapon type.
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Following this tutorial might help. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT4smmI03zM
You can use the filtering option to guarantee it samples from only one location. I recommend using the skeletal mesh sampler if you can, since using a bone will be much more consistent when swapping meshes than using a triangle
This should allow for consistent UV sampling from a set location. The only bad thing about this is I think increasing the ribbon width will stretch the texture, not increase the texture sampling area. If this happens, I think there should be a way around that by plugging your Ribbon Width into the material- I’ve done something similar before with object scale. If you want to take this route, let me know and I’ll dive more into getting that figured out.
