WHAT
This week we’ll learn how to recreate several advanced effects from the Unreal Engine 5 demo. We’ll walk you through the techniques and design theories behind the bats, insect swarms, and our recent position-based dynamics-driven popcorn sim: “The Kernel”. This deep dive will cover spatial hashes, boid simulators, constraints, procedural generation of structural support systems and more!
1.) Will there be more examples in the Content Examples niagara level as well covering simple versions of the samples covered in the stream? niagara is such a beast of a system and i almost feel like whats there is not quite enough to cover the massive amount of possibilities that it can do.
I feel like these other ones are not going to be covered in the livestream even if i did ask them then. while they are niagara related, they don’t quite relate to the intended content, but i wanted to ask anyway and maybe get some insight
2.) implementing tooltips for user created variables, or setting min/max possible values? Sometimes a name can’t quite cover what the full functionally entails and might need some explanation to the user. and going above or below a value could cause visual or technical issues if values are set incorrectly.
4.) Will it be possible/ are there plans in the future to edit user parameters through the anim notify system in an animation sequence? This would be nice to have one base system and not have to copy paste the same system or edit it elsewhere for a tweak or two or driving parameters at certain times in the animation with curves. Example being dust when a character steps and has 2 different intensities or variable spawn rates/velocities.
4.5) on the topic of animation notifies, would it be possible to add the transform gizmo for the selected notify, so that setting the offsets are not a guess/adjust cycle if a socket has not be defined for it specifically?
5.) Regarding the component renderer. I know its experimental and there are gonna be updates to it, but, at least for the post process component, will/is there a way to limit the range of the postprocess? in blueprint this was done with it being parented to a collider and which as far as i can tell isn’t possible here? and for the skeletal mesh anim, is there a way to set a random start time? or will that be dictated by spawn rate?
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I’m still struggling how to implement the rest of the lens flare effect with Niagara. Using what I know from Unreal Fest Online lesson only led to engine crash when attempting to use the camera data interface. My Cascade knowledge doesn’t help much either.
Last few days I’ve been trying to pass the RBD sim to Niagara and had few issues:
1 - I didn’t find a good solution to transfer mesh orientation. I had to generate a fake N from orient inside Houdini and export both orient and N, then I used this normal as Look at direction in “orient mesh to vector” module + orient as *quaternion override *+ N as reference axis vector + 1 *o**verride incoming orientation. *This feels like an overly complex answer to a simple rotation question.
2 - When I try to convert emitter to GPU sim, I get an “invalid type for index in NiagaraEmitterInstance.ush”
3 - After the first frame I have a weird position offset on each piece.
I really hope to see a solution for this two problems during the stream
1.) Yes, 4.26 will have more content examples, especially for more advanced features like simulation stages
2.) I don’t think there is anything planned in that direction.
5.) For the post process component you can calculate the camera distance yourself in particle update and then turn the volumes on or off based on that distance. For the skeletal mesh animation start or other more advanced setups you need to create a scene custom blueprint with the component type you want to create as parent. So if you want to have a custom skel mesh animation, create a class derived from skeletal mesh component, add a property and use it in the component renderer. There will also be a new content example in 4.26 that showcases custom components with the renderer.
Hi, great stream! I’m curious about the StaticSkeletalMeshAnimation workflow, I cnanot seem to locate anywhere documentation how to use this. All I can find is for the Vertex Animation Tool.
Thanks alot!
