I have had my application approved for a light festival art piece happening in 5 months’ time.
I have over 20 years of experience inside 3D studio Max and about 60 hours inside Unreal engine from an architectural visualiser POV so in essence I am very naive as to how much work it would take to do the following project.
where a viewer would blow on a fan on a plinth and that controls the flow of spores off the mushroom/s.
I have the next 5 months to dedicate to this and so I’m hoping someone might suggest if they were starting out and had this as the goal, what parts of Unreal should I start learning and in what order.
Also, how would I get this fan to control the spores simulation?
You can start studying how the Niagara particle system works, exposing the particle system parameters to Blueprints will give you an almost total control of the simulation in real-time.
The best niagara resources I found are a vfx course on Udemy and the CGHow channel on YouTube.
You can also find some examples in the Unreal content example project (free on the marketplace) but it’s not self explanatory, especially if you don’t have any experience with Unreal.
If someone has to suggest something else I’m also interested!
I think Niagara particles will be a great fit for simulating the spores.
Some of the Niagara features are demonstrated in the Content Examples project.
Also I noticed this ‘Particle Wind Control’ asset in the permanently free collection. It uses the previous particle system ‘Cascade’ but could be worth a look.
So I’d start with the Niagara Particles ↔ Wind interaction. (You’ll want to create a way to control the wind via keypresses so you don’t pass out when trying to test it. )
Getting fan input in UE is an interesting problem. Maybe the solution involves an arduino. To be honest the idea of festival-goers blowing strongly at a specific object is off-putting. (Going to chalk that thought up to post-covid trauma ) An alternative idea would be to have them rotate something, and the rotation the object translates into rotating the wind direction, plus maybe a slider to control the wind speed.
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) An alternative idea would be to have them rotate something, and the rotation the object translates into rotating the wind direction, plus maybe a slider to control the wind speed.