Howdy all;
Does anyone happen to know how I might be able to query a particle system for the location and name of each of its particles? Any help is greatly appreciated.
O_o that might be so extremely heavy you’d crash your computer.
Innitial location might not be so much a trouble, but if you’d spam a few k’s of particles… I dont even want to know.
yet curious, so subscribing to read any potential answers.
Heheh aye, might be nutty. BUT! I was thinking maybe, if I have a super lightweight particle system flying little nothing particles around. Then I query it for the particles name and locations once every frame or so. Then I could maybe use mesh instances to put little bee or bird or what ever type meshes at there location and since its they would all be a single instanced mesh. It might create flocking type stuff for what I’m working on.
hehe I kinda expected both your questions to be related.
What you could do, if you are really inclined to use meshes (id probably use some spritesheet or so for small details) you could make a lot of tiny bee’s in i.e. 3dsmax and combine them all to be one (rotating) mesh. that way two or three rotating meshes could create a rather interesting swarm.
Additionally either with vertex animation, or world offset material awesomeness you can add additional flow/random to it.
As far as I know, you can’t get the location of particles. I asked one of the tech artists at Epic in a DM and he said particles only know about themselves. I think that’s part of what makes them particles (efficient)
Reading the other comments though, it sounds like you want to do a mesh emitter. You can do that. Open Cascade, right click on your emitter, do TypeData->NewMeshData. Then you have your mesh type and you can assign a static mesh to it.So you can just assign your bee mesh to the MeshData and then control the particles like regular particles.
That’s pretty much all there is to it. If you want it to animate, check out Morph Targets. It’s a little more involved than it sounds like you need but idk.
EDIT:
I was thinking in a different context. To find a single particle’s location you can use the ParticlePositionWS node in the material editor. I haven’t tried it but here’s the documentation Vector Expressions | Unreal Engine Documentation
Thank you so very much for asking the tech folks 
Originally I was thinking might add enemy actors at each particle location. Instead my main enemies are bunch tons of physics actors and for the smaller enemies I have done just as you suggested, mesh particle types. But I did not think to add morph targets into that equation which is genius! So many thank yous for that too