Hey guys,
As the name suggests, I can’t really find a use for them. You can set the particle template to use, and some settings, but none of it matters -‘Spawn Emitter Attached’ takes in all of that each time you call it, anyway. I feel like that node is actually totally bypassing my component, and thus the Particle Component is not at all being used.
Is this the case?
Thanks.
Spawn Emitter Attached creates a new Particle Component.
It can be useful when building Actors to inherently incorporate a particle component in the Actor instead of spawning it dynamically.
And as opposed to this, how does one use an incorporated particle component? (As a bonus; what are some good use cases for this? A gun’s muzzle flash, for example?)
I think it is useful any time you know that the Actor is always going to require it and also just need one. The Component is pre-allocated as part of the Actor set up and you don’t get any (relatively minor) overhead of initializing at run time.
If you have a component that you’ve added in the components panel of the blueprint editor it will appear as a variable and you can drag a reference to it on your blueprint graph and from that reference do things like play, stop, etc. The particle component has a flag for auto-activate so that the particle system becomes active on startup or you can choose to instigate it at a point of your choosing.
It’s definitely up to you how you want to organize your blueprints and I wouldn’t say there is definitively a correct way though within your project I’m sure you’ll develop a best practice.