Simple blueprint projectile/weapon vfx setup.

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

Hi, so I’m throwing together a quick VFX portfolio, and am unsure how to show off a certain effect.
Essentially, I wanna have a plasma/energy ball shooting out of a source (in this case a generic turret i modelled for demonstrating weapon fx ) with a trail behind it, and an explosion/wave dispersing out upon collision. I figured I could get away with specifying init. velocity for the particles and just have the whole thing shoot out periodically - that way I wouldn’t have to bother with blueprint. The problem is that when I specify init. velocity on the axis I need the ball to travel in, the ‘ball’ effectively falls apart, since none of the particles live long enough to travel the distance that I need (it’s like a quick jittery lightning-ball like effect where all the particles have a very low lifetime).

To help visualize what I mean, here’s a shot. Basically for the purpose of this demonstration I want the energy ball going in a straight line from point A (the turret) to point B (the vertical panel).

a75441aafe381a5aced44e876e74c6bac9cba61f.jpeg
a75441aafe381a5aced44e876e74c6bac9cba61f.jpeg1318×640 64.4 KB

As I said, there’s going to be a trail behind it as well as collision event consisting of an energy wave.

I have absolutely no BP/coding experience, so my question is, is there a way to set this up easily in blueprint? The projectile just needs to shoot out from a fixed location on mouse click/key press (I suppose I could bind it to the turret actor but since the turret is static I don’t really see the point). I’ve looked at a bunch of weapon tutorials but they all seem way too complicated for what I want.

Also, how should I handle the collision as well as setup for the particle systems? Currently I have the energy ball and plasma wave as two separate systems (plus a third one for the trail possibly). I imagine the wave system can activate once the projectile collides with the panel? Or is having them all be different emitters in the same system and somehow activating them via BP a better idea? If so, how would I do that? Is there a way to drive various parameters in cascade via blueprint?

2

…nobody knows?? lol

3

Im guessing your background is just making assets of sorts, but I would highly suggest learning Blueprints as they are super easy and powerful. What I would do for this is make a new blueprint, add a projectile component, a sphere component, and a particle emitter. When the player presses mouse1, fire an event that will shoot the projectile. Now for the collision, inside the newly created blueprints Event graph, you would check to see if the sphere compoent has hit anything, and if it has, destroy the actor, play a sound, and spawn a particle emitter for the impact.

You should take a look at the FPS blueprint example, it shows how to spawn a projectile, and check for when it hits something.

4

Unreal has a lot of things already set up & ready to go, to some degree.

Shirk pretty much nailed it but here are some starting places that might help:
(these are done in earlier engine versions but most apply & work, if not just search forums google etc for solutions)

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Videos/Player/index.html?series=PLZlv_N0_O1gZg3dTMetmsfm_s4lb4-Tg0&video=ojvuTz4KCfE

that is from this series:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Videos/Player/index.html?series=PLZlv_N0_O1gZg3dTMetmsfm_s4lb4-Tg0&video=ojvuTz4KCfE

pretty much these basically cover what you are looking for, after you follow & do the tutorial if it doesn’t already say so, instead of the projectile mesh or even with it, put a particle effect (like Shirk mentioned) from the starter content with it ( has fire/ explosions/ & smoke /steam that you could use to see what it does)(then later dig deeper into the docs & make your own effects etc.)

and if you have no experience and want to find out more:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Videos/index.html?category=Blueprints

then move on thru some of these as they become of interest:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Videos/index.html