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…
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…