Intro to Niagara Particles [UE4/UE5]

hello and welcome to a new tutorial series on the prismatica dev channel this one is called something something to do with niagara 100 with particles preferably something with the alliteration like uh uh pathway to particle perfection i don't know if you've got a good name uh put it in the comments please i'm begging you so what are we going to be covering in this tutorial series well we are going to be covering niagara particle system we're not going to be worrying about cascade this is applicable to unreal engine 4 and 5. i think the more important thing to note is what we aren't covering and that is specific use cases like how do i make a blood particle system or how do i make a explosion particle system and how do i make a very specific thing you know charlie do all the work for me i can't be bothered using my brain we're not doing that we're gonna be going through much like my material series each little individual component or they're actually called modules in niagara uh what it does and what we can use it for now the last thing to note before we dive in is that particles are 50 particle logic and 50 material logic so i'm gonna be assuming that you are up to date with everything in the five minute materials series i'm only going to be going into depth about the actual particle side of things and the particle side of the materials so the first thing that we're going to be looking at today is how do we make a particle system well we right click we go to effects and we want to go to a niagara emitter now niagara systems are built in kind of three layers i guess um there is a system which is the the the biggest you know the top layer uh like the container i guess so the the system is the thing that actually gets spawned in the world then that system contains an emitter or multiple emitters and each of those emitters contain modules that tell the particles how to behave and what they're doing and when they die and all that kind of stuff right now we're going to create an emitter um and we're just gonna do an empty one i think empty is a good place to start all right we double click on it and all of a sudden we are in the niagara editor interface thingo thingo as you can see there is literally nothing going on here there's not too much going on here uh and there's a lot of stuff going on here this is basically just the the details panel you know so if i click on initialize particle then we get all of the the details related to this module um so initialize particle is you know where you set the lifetime of the particle where you set the the size so in order to actually get something happening on the screen we need to add a module that is going to spawn particles so we're going to do that in the emitter update section we're going to go we'll do spawn rate so spawn rate is going to spawn continuously you know over time so spawn rate spawn rate 10 it's going to be spawning 10 particles per second now in the initialize these are lasting for five seconds and you can see that it just looks like a white dot pretty boring now the reason it's just a white dot is because we're not actually telling these particles that are being spawned to do anything we're not saying you know move we're not adding velocity we're not adding wind force we're not blah blah blah blah so on particle spawn we can add a velocity now whenever you add something and you get this red error the warning is usually very comprehensive it'll tell you exactly what to do in order to fix it so all that's happening in this case is there is just a module that doesn't exist that needs to exist for add velocity to work so that is apply initial forces we're gonna click fix issue cool okay so we could go here we could go random vector uh vector scale we could do random float random range float between one and i don't know 100 and then in the particle update we also need a solve forces and velocity that's just another dependency that i completely ignored in the warning all right one last little thing that we'll do is we will go to initialize particle uh we're gonna go to the sprite size mode and we're gonna set it to uniform now the uniform sprite size let's just do i don't know random rangefloat again we love that one between 10 and 100 okay 100's a bit too big 50 so this is going to make them random sizes 50 is also too big let's just do 10 and 20. and then what we can do in particle update is go scale um sprite size and we are going to we'll just select a preset and we're going to grab actually maybe i could do like a bell curve yeah drop off and so what this is gonna do is it's getting the normalized age as the the time value so normalized age is zero to one over the lifetime of the particle you know regardless of what its lifetime is uh and then we're just saying go from scale one and then multiply by zero so you can see as these particles finish up their life span they shrink out into nothingness just so they disappear nicely okay so we've set up a super simple kind of pointless little thing now why have we done this in an emitter and not a system the way i like to use emitters is emitters are like the the template for you know a particle type for example let's just say i have some sparks from fire you know sparks little those sparks will act in the same way regardless of how i'm kind of spawning them so for example we could have sparks that are just coming from a fire that uh you know they they kind of float around uh their color goes from super glowing hot to dark and then they disappear um they last for x amount of seconds they're affected by the wind this much they'll always have that same functionality that same logic but if i wanted to do something like you know a magic spell where a character like just shoot sparks out of their hand and the sparks get shot out or if i wanted to do something like the sparks coming off a weapon and you know when the weapon gets swung these sparks kind of shoot off of the weapon um you know matching its velocity that's where i would use a different system that uses that same emitter as the template for the thing so as a little example i'm just going to go through and make a spark really quickly so what i'm going to do i'm going to add some drag we're going to get some curl noise force i'm also going to make the scale way freaking smaller we're going to scale the sprite size by speed so we're going to make it get thin and long as it goes fast uh we need to make sure that this is velocity aligned align velocity align there we go now they're kind of stretching out as they go along uh we could give it some wind force i'm not going to bother plugging this wind into a niagara parameter collection because that's a thing for another day right and then we're going to update the color and what we'll do is we will make a color from curve we're going to make them start as i don't know very yellow then they are going to turn red and then they will turn black all right so here's our super basic particle system looks pretty dodge but basically what we've done is we've set up a template for you know sparks so what we'll do now is we're gonna get this emitter we're going to right click we're going to create a niagara system call it spark burst and then let's make another one create an argo system this one can be called spark area so we now have this system and as you can see it's basically the same thing as before but what we're going to do instead of spawn rate we're going to override this so we're going to click disable then we're going to go here we're going to go spawn burst instantaneous spawn count of 1000 and now this system is what gets put in the world so we can put this in the world um it should continue to like yeah just loop over and over because i haven't specified it to you know only happen once so the next little system that we're going to do this is the we call this one spark area so what we're going to do with this one is we're going to get rid of the add velocity at the start and what we will do is on particle spawn we're going to specify an area so like a cylinder location the radius of this cylinder can be like 300 and the height can be much smaller maybe like 10 or something and so now we have this spark area effect and we can just put this in the world and bam we have some sparks that are spawning in an area continuously so this could be used for you know something like lava or you know when something's on fire or whatever this could be used for explosions but you can see that the sparks have the exact same kind of core functionality you know they have this kind of noise vector you know random kind of rotation whatever they get thinner and longer as they go faster and then as they die off they change into red and then they turn into like little ashes for a bit and it was kind of as simple as that we created these two completely different systems from our template emitter that we that we created so that's how i use emitters just to make life way easier so you don't have to repeat yourself over and over again so that kind of concludes the uh the video for today i didn't want to go too deep into it we will be playing with a lot of other cool effects like you can see this sword blood trail that i have here um looks pretty gruesome pretty goopy and you know i've got some other cool things here you can see like like i was saying you know like sparks that follow the direction of you know whatever their parent is and all that all that fun stuff nothing personnel kid but yeah anyway that's that's the video i hope you learned something i hope this was a nice little introduction if you do have recommendations for the name of this series please drop them in the comments below if you do want to ask any questions the best place to do so is in our discord which is linked below if you do want to support this channel one step further then you know subscribing and liking the video and commenting on an algorithm and do so monetarily for as little as one dollar per month in the patreon which is linked in the description i hope that you are looking forward to the particle series so with that i say goodbye goodbye [Music] you

Channel: PrismaticaDev

Views: 95,446

Keywords: ue4 particles, ue4 particle effects, ue4 particle system, ue4 particle tutorial, ue4 niagara fire, ue4 niagara explosion, ue5 particle system, ue5 niagara tutorial, ue5 niagara fire, particles, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, vfx, vfx tutorial, ue4 vfx tutorial, ue4 vfx material, ue4 vfx course

Id: 04k9JDx-KTM

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2022