RANT about Niagara // Scratchpad // Developer Assistant

Development Asset Creation FX
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I just need to rant and vent for a minute about the horrendous experience that is learning niagara for Unreal 5.xx
if you´re trying to do some more advanced stuff and have zero programming knowledge and try to learn scratchpad modules with the unreal developer assistant…:slight_smile:

Now, I love Unreal to pieces, but I come from a 3ds max // DCC workflow and Niagara is what I´ve put off longest.
But its pretty much one of 2 or 3 things keeping me from ditching 3ds max completely and so I finally started.

And overall: I was pleasantly surprised how much I could already do after watching just a few tutorials and dissecting some examples.

But today I got stuck for hours, trying to figure out how to make mesh particles both oriented towards their velocity vectors AND have additional spin…
Or, heck, just have some random rotation offset.

I kinda get that rotations are tricky in general (i´ve dealt with my fair shair of gimbal locks on rigs etc) and I´m really dumb when it comes to vector math.

So, I was hoping to get some help from the new developer assistant.
Because surely, it must know MORE about Unreal, than a randomGPT chatbot…
But alas…it kept spitting out nonsensical nodes and failed to explain the most simple concepts to me.

I´ve had mixed results in general when trying to use chatGPT for Unreal things, but man…I really wish You guys would focus a bit on actually training your own LLM on actual documentation of your visual scripting stuff.

Because its generally incredibly confusing how many different nodes or nodes that SOUND the same but do something completely different in ONE visual scripting editor vs another one.

I don´t expect any unification here that probably doesn´t even make sense, but at least some better learning paths or , well, a better trained LLM would help massively on making the entry into higher level stuff easier for “advanced beginners” like me…

Eventually, after half a day wasted, I returned to just tweaking parameters to get the look I was after. It wasn´t what I wanted, but again, no way to figure this out via scratchpad and no prior programming knowledge…

There are no questions and no searching for advice here, just a little rant and vent.

Again: LOVE Unreal otherwise and can´t believe I still feel like an early adopter using Unreal for TV/VFX rather than games…I mean, I´ve been doing this since 2022 now…

1 Like
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Thanks for the feedback, is there anything in particular about scratch pad or Niagara that was confusing to you that should be changed? I know it can be hard to delve into advanced topics on any of UE’s tools due to spotty documentation.

About the developer assistant: it is still very experimental and not fit for production use. So it is very much not better than randomGPT in a lot of cases, but hopefully that will change as time goes on.

Regards,
Michael

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Sorry for the rant, I never expect a dev to actually respond to those…:slight_smile:

Often its just that I don´t have the time following a proper learning path, but, as I said, they ARE also kinda rare for Niagara to even find.

In general, I´m very much a “jump in and find out”-type learner and if I can´t figure it out by dissecting examples or applying what I know from similar areas (in this case: Blueprints), I really struggle…

Two areas I struggled most were:

-understanding the difference and similarities between parameters in scratchpad and variables in blueprints
This was the worsened a lot by the unreal dev assistant constantly asking me to use variables…that didn´t exist under that name in scratchpad…:slight_smile:
And then also understanding what the namespaces are for, when to use “input” vs “particles” etc.
-understanding the flow
As everything basically starts with some form of “map get” to get some existing data from the niagara emitter and those “map get” nodes do not have an exec pin leading OUT…I was constantly trying to figure out how to chain things in my flow and again, the unreal dev failed exceptioanally in explaining this…
For example: Do I need to get several map get nodes only for visual clarity, or does it have other effects, if I get them with one particular node?
Should I use ALL map gets right at the start of the module and if not, why not?
How do you Branch/Sequence?
Can you nest modules inside modules, like you can nest functions inside functions?

Generally, when logic is different to the “Main” visual coding area (aka Blueprints), I´d love to have some basic introduction about these specifics.

That being said:
I just went through the “introduction to Niagara´s scratchpad” and its pretty good and I REALLY should stop trying to just “jump in and find out”, a lot of the info I didn´t understand was in there…

Often enough I can “swindle” my way through complex topics this way, but visual scripting in a way is similar to “vibe coding”: It HELPS my more visually oriented brain to understand coding much better than actual code, but I would still need to understand the basics of the underlying code to actually just “Jump in and find out”.

Hope that makes sense, but yeah, Unreal is generally doing an exceptional job at giving me as a semi-tech-artist-generalist a ton of access to tools that are very intuitive and user friendly.

And hopefully its gonna evolve even more to include AI with tools like this plugin I just found:

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Awesome, thanks for the detailed reply. I’ll try to see how we can get the developer assistant to a place where it can answer questions like the ones you posted with accurate info and not something hallucinated.

Have you tried using lightweight emitters? They are less complex and don’t rely on graphs under the hood. While less expressive, they are more beginner friendly due to the reduced feature set.

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Yeah, unfortunately, I can only use niagara, if I get right into the deepend…:slight_smile:
I don´t know if you know 3ds max tyFlow, but its pretty extensive what you can do with it.
I´ve been exporting particles as objects with it and then just imported them via datasmith including all the baked animation.
That works decently for around 1000-4000 particles, but anything more and sequencer crashes.
So, thats the first thing I can´t work around and need to use niagara for anyways.

Plus: the whole import/export process is quite tedious, as you can´t just reimport the datasmith with lots of particles, as I then need to fix the references in the animation sequences and that sometimes takes up to half an hour, so I mostly just end up deleting the imported datasmith completely and reimporting it, but then I also need to reassign materials etc etc.

And, once its working, tweaking the system is a lot faster of course.

I think right now, figuring out how combine multiple rotations like “flight” orientation+local axis spin would be the most impactful thing to figure out, if you know any particular tutorial I could check out for that, I´d be happy already…:slight_smile: