Hey All,
I’ve been trying to make a tentacle effect that would snake along the ground by making new particles that would essentially stick to a spot on the ground in front of its predecessor using Niagara ribbons, and while I can make the tentacle I don’t know how to get a series of coordinates along the surfaces that I want it to spawn on. I feel like if I could have each particle do a sort of line trace as they spawn and then move to the location from the line trace it should work terrifically, but I cant find a way to have the particles line trace. Is there a way I can do this with the scratch editor or is there some alternative solution?
For reference, I would like to do something similar to the way the kraken’s tentacles slide up the ship in this clip from Pirates of the Caribbean (1 minute in)
Update: I now have an array of vector3’s that will act as locations for the ribbon particles to spawn, however the array is stored in the blueprint. Is there any way I could get that array and pass it or it’s values into the niagara scratch module? I’d only be looking at about ten variables max in the array at any given time
Second update: Found it, its just its own variable type rather than a type of vector. However, I seem to have a problem passing the variables through to the emitter. any advice debugging this part would always be greatly appreciated
The variables themselves don’t seem to be the problem seeing as I am able to spawn cubes at the locations in the array, but the emitter seems to be unable to do the same.
The Niagara settings:
The Scratch module:
Third Update: The problem seems to arise from the particle ID values. I set the location of the particles up to be a vector of x=0 y=0 z=10 multiplied by the ID, which should presumably set the z location to be 0,10,20,30,40, etc however it caused the particles to have some very wacky locations (thousands or so along the y axis)
Heres the module I was using:
I’m really lost at this point, I cant find anything that will help me understand particle ID interactions and I don’t know any alternatives. If anybody has any ideas, please let me know.