I need a trail effect for a fast object (meteor) and cannot rely on sprites due to the huge spawn rate I would need.
To avoid sprites, I am experimenting with ribbons, but have issues unrolling properly the texture behind the meteor as you can see in this video:
(the texture stays more or less put in the direction of the meteor path, put moves on the orthogonal direction which is not what I want)
. My setup is the following:
- The meteor is an actor BP with a Niagra particle system attached. The distanced covered by the meteor since creation is updated each tick and sets a varaible in the niagara effect. The goal of this variable is to keep track the length of the texture needed for the ribbon.
- The Niagara system includes a ribbon. There is a dynamic material parameter module in the particle update section of the ribbon. It receives the distance variable as well as the tiling length used for the material of the ribbon.
- The material used for the meteor includes a panner that offsets the U coordinate of the ribbon texture by some distance computed thanks to the dynamicparameters. The goal is to compensate the movement of the meteor to make the texture fixed with respect to the ground (the smoke emitted by the meteor should be more or less still and should not follow the meteor like a default ribbon would do). My issue as can be seen in the video is that the movement in the direction of the meteor is more or less compensated, but I still get a movement in the orthogonal direction. It might be a problem in the material but I was expecting the U coordinate to correspond to the axis along the length of the ribbon and did not touch the V coordinate (SpeedY = 0 in the panner and TexCoord[1] not modified).
Here are the relevant parts of the meteor BP, Niagara system and material:
