Intro to Niagara FX - Making Particle Systems in Unreal Engine

hello everyone I'm Jason Kaiser welcome to this intro to Niagara video I'm going to share three simple tips that are going to get you started into Niagara these tips were super useful to me as I was watching Khadijah Chamberlain's videos over on our website if you want to get started into those videos you can just click the link in the description we're giving you a full hour of content for free along with the source files that they work from as they're teaching the video so that's awesome on that note as well there's just a lot of other great content over on our site that I highly recommend you checking out we cover full beginner never touched an effects editor or drawn in your life all the way up to fully Advanced content for those of you who are already working as effects artists it really covers the full spectrum of skills alright well let's dive into this little effect that I want to make and I'm going to share those three tips with you as we go along [Music] all right so let's dive into creating the effect in Niagara and I'm going to go through those three tips as I go along and you're welcome to follow along at home either in your own project file or with the project that hadija created that I mentioned that you can download it really doesn't matter you'll be able to follow along either way so we're here in unreal 5 and the first tip is to get yourself oriented unreal5 can be a little overwhelming that's totally a normal feeling it's a bit like stepping into a jet fighter cockpit where there's just a million knobs in front of you and you're afraid if you push one wrong then you might blow something up right it's a little different than say I don't know like I would imagine a crop duster airplane or something like that would be a lot simpler but here we are in a jet fighter we have a lot more power at our fingertips which is a great thing and sometimes the scary thing and that's totally fine I'm going to walk you through just the pieces that you need so you don't have to worry about the rest at least not for now we can get into that later so if I right click here anywhere in my content browser in a blank space I can create a Niagara system I can also if I let's see if I give myself enough space by right clicking nope not going to do that oh perfect it's not in front of my my head I can also create a Niagara system over here under effects Niagara system it's just really simple either way so I created Niagara system and what I want from these options is to create an empty system there we go and my wish shall be granted I have a new Niagara system right here let's get really creative and call it um particles whatever all right we double click on particles and now we've got this thing going on here if you have another monitor it can be nice to put it over there or I just like to drag it up and dock it here so I can flip between my main window and my particle window okay so orientation tip number one you want to understand the different parts of the software that are important to you first thing you might notice mine's probably a little different than yours this window over here probably looks something like this so don't freak out if you're like uh why isn't it dark so this window is under window if you can imagine that and then it's under preview um preview scene settings it looks like I nudged my window a little bit here let's bump that back up so that's the previous scene settings uh go ahead and play around with whatever you want over here you can change the color to be darker or lighter I just like a nice dark gray color because it makes my particles pop but you can do whatever you want just make sure that when you're done with that window you come back to selection because you'll notice when you click on anything out here the selection panel lights up with options and those options are going to be very important as we get into this all right uh click and drag so my camera's fixed here okay so the different parts are a particle system that's this here and really just this whole window here represents the particle system container inside of that we have all of the particle emitters that's the next component think of an emitter like a garden hose so the particle system would be like a collection of garden hoses I guess and then each emitter is an individual garden hose beneath that you have a module which would be like settings on each hose of or each emitter I'm going to stick with the hose analogy people that's why it's going to go and uh then you've got parameters that are specifically like the exact numbers or data that's put into each module so let me show you what I'm talking about I can add an emitter here so I can right click and now I don't want to be under parent emitters or behavior examples I want to be under templates and I want to come over to Fountain that's the emitter for us uh now it's like a garden hose maybe you can see what I was talking about so it's spraying out these particles I can zoom in with my mouse wheel I can left click and drag and look around and I've got this beautiful emitter that is sitting in my particle system you can imagine I could create more and more and more of these it would create more orange boxes for this tutorial we're not going to do that we're going to keep it nice and simple so let's see got all this in here and then I don't know I've got different modules you can start seeing as you're working on getting oriented they've color coded some things for you there's the red color code which and I apologize if you're colorblind and this is a challenge at all but just trust me on this anything that relates to the emitter is red and it's kind of a reddish orange and then anything that relates to the particle spawn is green or particles in general is going to be green rather so that's kind of cool so what's an example of a module well we've got spawn rate over here and if we change that spawn rate down to something like I don't know like four we can instantly see that by switching that parameter it dropped way down now some modules are more complicated than others like if I go to I don't know like initialize particle that's going to have a lot more settings on it than the spawn rate did so over here I've got things like uniform Sprite and then if you're like me it may not have enough room so you can grab it there you can also grab it here so you can actually read what the dang thing is saying the uniform Sprite sized men I don't know let's see what 250 does it's always fun to mess around that's what I love about being a particle artist you're just tinkering all the time we're just Tinkers screwing around with stuff cool so now we've got these kind of massive fuzzy Globs popping out so I changed the parameter here this is what we call a parameter is this number itself the module would be here if I click on this it's got like lots of modules inside of it or I can choose just one of them because you can see this is like a header right here so take some time maybe pause this video Even and just kind of poke around and get familiar with what the different things in the interface do if you want to skip ahead you can go ahead and Skip ahead and try doing all kinds of crazy stuff with it okay so that's step number one get yourself oriented take a minute to breathe calm down it's not so bad I promise once you get into it it's actually quite fun second tip we're going to go into materials all right if I come let me go ahead and save this because you never know when your computer might act up on you and crash or something so I come over here to materials I have a nice organized materials folder uh let's see um now I want to say in Block ends in the materials yeah that's where I'm going to go and I'm just going to create a material here you can put your material wherever you want don't worry too much about file structure quite yet just for now you've got enough on your plate and just get yourself oriented if you're more experienced and you know better then you know that you should put your materials in a very clean and tidy place but for those that are just getting started it's okay let's name it something creative like new material awesome double click into that thing now we've got now we're rolling we've got three windows open we've got our material here so you're going to see a lot of stuff turned on here this was something that really stood out to me as I was watching hadija's intro to Niagara series I really love how they just kept it super simple and I'm gonna do the same thing for you today maybe even simpler than what they did now you can't really teach Niagara without teaching materials at least a little bit the material is the particle itself like think of it like the little card like if you had a clear plastic or clear glass card you want to think of the material as whatever is displaying on that card and then you throw that thing through the air and now you have a moving particle and hopefully it doesn't chatter when it hits the ground so we've got our material here and I want it on a card so this option here in the middle is the card option cool so by default unreal has this really fancy looking shimmery shiny thing and you see it's got things like metallic and specular and roughness and anastropy I don't even know what these things are I guess if you Mouse over them speaking of tip number one and getting oriented you can teach yourself and learn pretty much what anything in unreal does just by mousing over it which is pretty handy to note but we don't want our material to be so complicated so to simplify it before I do anything else in here I'm going to come over here to the the blend mode and I'm going to change that from opaque over to translucent some of my options disappeared instantaneously and then I'm going to change the shading model from default lit to unlit and then a couple more went away as well so now we've got just four options four we got emissive color opacity World position offset and refraction yes we can do particles that have some of those other fancy things that went away but we want to keep it simple and get through this quickly so let's just go ahead and right click over here and it's going to be critical if you're doing a particle material to have particle color that's one thing that you're definitely going to want to want you're definitely going to want and then you're going to want some kind of texture to go with that usually if I hold the button t on my keyboard and I left click that gives me a texture sample now I can come over here and I can go back to my browser now I'm going to cheat a little bit I'm going to use one of the amazing textures painted by Ali Sorensen in our texture painting series so this is available again over on our site in one of our classes she actually painted all of these Textures in there it's intro to texture painting using creda it's free software and it's a great series that she does covering how to paint really cool looking textures for use in particle systems and I really like this ring texture she has here I'll open this up so you can see it up close a good texture I cannot overstate this enough a really really well painted texture can just carry a particle system and make the whole thing look amazing you're going to see that happen here you'll be amazed at what I can do with this just one texture and a very simple Shader all right so I've got that texture selected here in my browser because it's selected all I have to do is push this over Arrow and it plops it in and now it's just a matter of wiring all this up so I've got the particle color there I've got the texture here I will need a multiply node as well so I'll hold the letter M on my keyboard as in multiply and I left click and there we have it so color is pretty straightforward I just want the particle color from the top to go into my emissive color this bottom one here is Alpha this is the transparency the clearness of the glass right that's going to pass into a on my multiply and then here I could really do any of these I could do RGB RG or B um you know I'm going to do R if you do RGB it'll also work but technically I only need to do one color because it's black and white and they're all the same and then that's going to take my transparency from the particle multiply it against the transparency of this grayscale thing and I'm going to put that into opacity so now I've got this nice transparent bursty glowy thingamajig and I want to make sure I save it and this is important because if you don't save your material it won't be read in the particle the particle won't know what the heck is going on so go back to particles and I want that material to be here I don't want that fuzzball right I want the texture that I came up with and now we're on to tip number three which is animating well I guess not quite tip number three because I still got to finish up the material let's just go down to Sprite renderer all I got to do is go back to my new material browse to it here now I've got it selected see what that did it selected that material for me and then I go back to my particles and I push this and bada bing my super shiny awesome material is loading that's preparing this Shader there it is we got Hoops jumping jumping through hoops pretty neat looking pretty good so now we're on to tip number three sorry for jumping the gun there I've got my material working I need to fix the animation on this because those ain't looking good it's really looking terrible so I want to figure out where my animation controls are for I don't know position maybe edits on the color maybe some edits on the size right how am I going to make those things animate or move over time in the way that I want them to so let's go ahead and first there's a few things that we can do I know I don't want gravity pulling this thing down so I'm going to uncheck Gravity Force if I just do that the gravity is going to turn off and now they just fly up forever next up I don't want the velocity to just move in One Direction I want it to kind of move in every direction so if I go to add velocity right here I can click up on income and I can do from point that'll get it spraying out everywhere pretty freaking cool and then I can come in here to the velocity speed and adjust that down to way way less I just want very subtle motion so I'm going to do a range a random range of between 5 and 10. so that's looking kind of cool so now I've got this like thing it's like randomly moving out in different directions and spawning but it's kind of like glitching it's like appearing really rapidly and that goes back to the particle color that I was mentioning here remember the alpha is how transparent it is or how much it's fading in I can save that so we want to fade it in a little more gradually so that's going to be under scale color so for that this doesn't look like color so I don't really like using the graph editor for color instead if I want to change the mode up here under scale mode I can switch that over here to a color curve linear color curve and let's see so this on the bottom is the alpha that's how transparent it is I want to drag that over here and then I can click over here and create a new one so now it's like full faded in in the middle but I want to fade it out at the beginning I just double click there change that little thingy to zero and now what we have is a nice fading now it's starting to look pretty cool so next up we can just change the color itself and we're almost done actually so if I come up here I can double click change that over to a yellow oh I like that quite a bit that's fine go change this over here to a purple everyone always likes to do yellow and purple so I'm going to do yellow and purple like I said in Niagara sometimes you have to double click a lot more oh my gosh is it just lagging out on me I think it's lagging out on me there we go kind of a purplish Hue up here I'll just do full saturated purple why not usually yellow and purple don't play nice together so I'll have to do something in the middle like say a cyan might help if I drag that around it's being kind of weird on me the curve is kind of glitching out oh I kind of like that though that's like technicolored prettiness all right and then last of all there's the a particle uh scale so I don't have particle scale in here so what I need to do is I just come into here and actually it's size so it's scale size so it's a Sprite scale Sprite size it's this one right here that I can select and you can see here I've actually added a module right now so that's another cool thing about Niagara is you can add as many modules as you want making this as complex as you want good or bad right and then over here I can just grab this little green line anywhere I want really so a Green Dot with the red line rather I'm going to put it up between somewhere between like 0.6 and 0.8 maybe around 0.7 and there we have it we've got a particle so three tips take a minute to breathe get yourself oriented know the material editor at least at a very basic level and how to animate with a few simple controls inside of Niagara and bada bing bonus tip make some awesome textures because obviously Ali's texture is hard carrying this effect like I promised it would um you don't get effects this pretty without pretty textures that's really what it comes down to all right so there you have it an effect made in Niagara with three simple tips to get you started I hope you had as much fun as I did please go ahead and check out that link in the description that's a great way to get started if you don't know what to do next a full free hour of content and the source files to go with it what have you got to lose also over on our website there's a Blog that goes over how to advance your career in effects how to get started how other people have advanced their careers in effects and no brainer you're here on the YouTube channel there's lots of other videos for you to check out here as well so thank you so much for being here we're so grateful for all the support that you give us I can't wait to get on to the next video and the next and the next and please keep us updated we've got a contact page over on our website as well we love hearing from you and hearing your success stories it inspires us so until next time keep on making awesomeness see ya [Music] oh foreign [Music]

Channel: VFX Apprentice

Views: 36,392

Keywords: jkFX, Tutorial (Media Genre), FX, effects, VFX, Game Effects, Drawing (Interest), Visual Effects (Film Company Role Or Service), Video Game (Industry), Video Game Development (Industry), Particle, Emitter, 3d fx, 3d VFX, real time VFX, unreal engine (software), game development, unreal engine, niagara (software), cascade (software)

Id: Gf1NHEz56ig

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022