my unsuccessful attempts at stylized VFX for a liquid weapon (acid / slime gun)

Semi-inspired by the Bio-Rifle in Unreal Tournament, I’ve been experimenting with creating VFX for a truly liquid-feeling weapon, but so far I’m not happy with anything I’ve tried:

  1. A ribbon looks good while standing still, but as soon as my character moves sideways, the continuity of the ribbon breaks, and it starts to double as seen here. Same issue with a Niagara Mesh renderer.

  2. Spawning / moving cylinder meshes along a spline also looks good when standing still… But it’s a static beam, and idk what kind of hackery i’d need to do to make it act physically like a stream of liquid.

  3. I created a metaball shader and put it on a capsule mesh in a projectile actor and tried spawning that and while the silhouette works, it’s still not looking like seamless fluid --unless-- I change the material to Unlit… but it’s still not good

  4. I thought using Niagara Liquid’s Particle Surfacing template would be the solution, and it does look great… Until you move around, then parts of the liquid get masked out based on the angle you’re viewing it from, and I’m too much of a noob to figure out how to fix it.

Maybe there’s an easy fix to something here?..