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Suggestion: Better Particle Instance Parameters

Unreal Engine Feedback for Unreal Engine team
#1

Hi everybody,
i know the Unreal Editor isn`t totally finished at this moment. also it is already great in so many ways :slight_smile:
my suggestions to improve the software even more concerns the particle system cascade:

I think the workflow to instance a parameter is a little bit confusing at the moment.
i think the instanced parameter should be visible in the instance parameters section (in the details panel) without the user manually assigning it.
moreover the parameter should automatically be of the right kind. like a color is a color only, and a float is just one float value.

when you are in blueprint and you want to drive the instanced parameters, there should be a simple dropdown with all the available instanced parameters.
this way you dont have to keep track on all the parameter names you used.

i hope its somehow clear what i mean :wink:
all the best!
keep up the good work!

#2

Are we talking about the “dynamic” param or something else? The dynamic param has to be inserted manually per case, 1st because it breaks the GPU particles and second because there is no real reason to add that in the code to automatically refresh and re-acquire it’s details in the PFX system. It sounds like an interesting idea but if that confuses you wait until you build bigger materials.

Now if you are talking about the Mat instances themselves it’s an interesting idea but still they would have to “attach” the whole mat editor / instance editor to the pfx library which i am sure it’s a seperate sollution and that could be 1 heavy and 2 confusing. You still have to compile every time you change an instance value so thats another issue, The pfx system would have to send a compile to the mat editor.

Again you get what I am saying, If that is something that can be easily done then sure i am also up for it, But from my understanding it’s not. Though i will wait for someone of Epic to reply here and correct me if i’m wrong. For the time being i suggest you try and solve that “confusion” so that you save yourself some headaches in the meantime.

#3

I think this is one of the main reasons why it’s not more widely supported. When a GPU particle emitter is created its module data is duplicated and stored on the GPU and is not touched by the CPU until it is cleaned up, I believe this is for performance reasons, updating the module data every frame would be more costly.