I’m a very beginner in UE4. Started working on a personal sandbox level for fun and its basically a missile/rocket launch type of mobile launcher.
Got the truck itself driving fine and the map created but haven’t done any of the VFX/smoke effects yet. The rocket launches just fine in terms of speed, motion, trajectory but it doesn’t yet have any explosion effects nor VFX, etc…
I bought some VFX addon asset packs in the Unreal Marketplace to assist with this since that means I don’t have to render the atlas myself… however initially I wanted the smoke to be truly volumetric like this :
but I was told it was too computationally complex, intensive etc to do in a real-time WASD unreal engine game/sandbox… and that it was better to stick with ordinary “particle systems” for the effect to simulate a 3D launch smoke…
Now I’m hearing that UE5 will lean heavily towards Niagara and that in the future might even oneday the original particle system will be depreciated or dropped support altogether…
My question is, since I haven’t actually implemented the smoke/ VFX yet, and this is a project in 4.25 that I want to be completely forward compatibile with UE5.X and beyond, would it be prudent to do any smoke effect only in Niagara instead of the old way?
Is it possible to do volumetric VFX in real-time games in Niagara and also are there likewise any asset packs that can be purchased for VFX on the UE marketplace that supports fully the Niagara for the current 4.25 and upcoming version 5?