"Pulsing" explosion

Hi,

I’m trying to create an underwater explosion VFX. That is different from an air explosion, because underwater explosions “pulse”. That is, there’s the initial expansion of the explosion, then the gases in the bubble are overcome by the water pressure and the bubble “collapses”, except at some point it starts expanding again and it may have a few cycles like that.

I tried to simulate this by a simple Niagara system, with confetti burst as the initial gas source, but I can’t get the “pulse” going. What I set up:

  • sphere as the source
  • High initial speed of the particles (about 600)
  • no gravity/no curl (just to simplify it to start with)
  • point attraction force curve - starting at 0, going to 6 at 0.1, and then to -5 at 0.6, scaled by 200. I played with these values a bit, but no luck..

The explosion is still, well, just an explosion. the point attraction force doesn’t seem to do anything much, or definitely not what I’d think it’d do.

Any help, especially YT tutorial links on this very much appreciated!

Cheers,

-smm

Hey there @wtfyoucare! Welcome back to the community!

For situations where you want more fine grain control over the particles, you may need to look into learning Niagara scratch pad. This allows you to handle particles in more ways than just the default modules.

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