As someone fairly new to creating particles / fx (experienced in maya), Should I still learn cascade or wait until Niagara is released in 4.20? Or is it a weird time to start learning fx right now and I should wait? I’m still a little confused about the differences. Does the workflow include using both of them? Or will Niagara completely replace cascade? Should I delve to deep into cascade still? I know how to make basic particles and have used cascade a bit, but I really am focused on learning how to make good fx now and want to make sure I’m focusing my time on the the proper workflow going forward
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Learn both… They are similar in a lot of ways in the sense of creating a stack for the . Niagara just gives you the option to use blueprint logic in that stack. I haven’t played around with it too much, but I’m assuming they still have all the same basic functions that you’d have in cascade.
Niagara will replace - may take a little bit
Cascade should still be around for a long time, removing it would break all of the projects using Cascade currently and in the near future. Niagra is still in an experimental state (not ready for shipping yet), so don’t expect them to seriously start talking about replacing Cascade until at least 4.24 (about a year away) or possibly even later than that. There is still more features to add, bugs to fix, feedback to gather, and refinements that need to take place over the next few releases before Niagra will be widely adopted, never mind becoming a replacement.
Even then, it’s still gonna be around for a long time like Matinee is still there, despite Sequencer being the next step.
I think that is 100% correct. Niagara is where we are going, but only people wanting to be on the bleeding edge of the engine should be jumping in with both feet right now. It isn’t in a shippable state for your game project. Cascade is shippable today and has a wealth of articles and knowledge that you can build from. There is a wide world of nuts & bolts everyday work that you can do in Cascade. That knowledge will be reasonably portable to Niagara, just with a lot of the limitations removed.
I’m in the same boat. Just now learning Cascade, and will stick with that while Niagra is pushed out and there is more info on how to use it. Otherwise things can get overwhelming fast!
I hope niagara would never replace cascade, because I don´t understand niagara after hours of testing…
Niagara is needed with the upcoming Chaos API. Which means that Niagara should be production ready along with Chaos. That now should happen with UE 4.25 or 4.26 …
There was Black Friday Sale and I (and many other) bought a big bunch of assets, also on the last market place events. There are tons of market place assets which use cascade. Do you really stop support cascade in the next years? Would be bad for all the market place assets. I think only a few will re-work everything in Niagra.
Would be very good, if Epic delivers something like a automatic converter. So all Cascade projects can be “converted”.
Niagara ribbon system is so bad now , when i use event to generate the ribbon when parent particle death the ribbon will mess .