Niagara - Watch work in progress thread (Info how to turn it on included)

[EoinOBroin]

@opiesche;730301

Hi guys,

We’re still hard at work getting it production ready. I realize how frustrating this must be with so little information for so long.
Over the past year, we’ve gone through multiple iterations in order to turn Niagara into a tool that is both powerful and easy to use. There’s been lots of iterating, lots of back and forth with our artists, and much writing, fixing, changing, and rewriting of the code along with enormous strides on the UI and workflow front as well in functionality and flexibility itself. For the past 8 months, we’ve been making rapid progress and are moving in a direction that we’re all happy with.
I don’t want to reveal too much yet, because we are still a ways from done, but what we can do in the system already is pretty amazing. It’s a complicated beast, with fully customizeable particle behaviors, data exchange from outside systems, a comprehensive event system, various levels of programmability, and to top it all off, transparent CPU/GPU simulation - so there are huge amounts of moving parts that all have to work together - and we’re trying to do this right, or as close to right as possible, the first time.
Workflows are really important to us as well, because we want to give the power user access to the full flexibility of the system (and it’s really flexible) while making it easy to perform the 99% case tasks of building visual effects. This has taken us a considerable amount of time, but we all feel we’re moving quickly into the right direction now.

The occasional drop of information should slowy increase to a trickle over the very near future, but we do have a ton of work still to do before we feel confident enough to open the floodgates

Really exciting! Can’t wait