Niagara Tutorial Blackhole VFX

all right my friends today we're gonna be making this black hole effect had a ton of fun making it use just very simple textures very simple techniques in order to achieve this really complicated looking effect but I assure you it's pretty straightforward stuff in order to make this I have a Google Drive link for you and it's gonna have these three assets in it we're gonna have like just a PNG of the textured waves and we're gonna have another waves texture as well and then this tiling noise asset we're gonna need that for the black hole texture you can find a link to that in the description so once you have that you'll just want to paste it into your unreal project that you make and this is just a blank old old project here so nothing fancy going on and the first thing you're gonna want to do is enable Niagara if you've never done that before so you're gonna go to edit plugins click on effects and make sure that you have this Niagara plug in effect we don't need the Niagara extras just just the base and when you enable it it's going to ask you to restart just go ahead and restart it and then it should kick you right back no big deal here alright so let's get started we're gonna make a bunch of textures first so I think that would be super helpful and what I'm gonna do here is we're gonna make a new folder I'm gonna call this particle systems and then inside of this folder we're gonna make a new folder called materials we're gonna want to do is I'm gonna grab these two I'm just gonna drag and drop them into here and I already have the tiling noise inside of this project but in order to get the tiling noise and you can't just drag and drop it you would have to close down your editor move the tiling noise asset into your contents folder and then restart your editor and then you'll have it I've found like a really clean way to import those you at you before assets so that's just what we have to deal with so in order to make textures out of these if you've never done any of this kind of textured work or material work before these are just image files nothing fancy going on in here I'm just bring it over for you make this and took just a few minutes you can definitely make your own no nothing nothing too fancy Oh close that so in order to make a material we're just going to right click in a crate material and we're gonna call this M underscore textured leaves there we go we're gonna open that up and get into the material editor here give herself a little bit of room this type of material is just very straightforward there's gonna be not a whole lot going on the black hole effects got some more stuff going on but don't worry about it all I'll walk you all through it the best thing about these kinds of textures is that we are just going to set this to unlit and additive and what that's gonna do is it's gonna make it translucent for us you can see it pretty much just disappeared right now and we're gonna right click in this open space we're gonna need to pull our particle color in because we want to control the color of these waves by the by the particle color so while we're in Niagra we want to be able to say like i want to make these waves green or purple or blue or whatever and that's what this particle color node allows you to do and then we're just going to multiply them together you can multiply by just hitting right click and then typing and multiply or you can hold down em on your keyboard and just left click and you get a little multiply node then we're just going to take all the channels from the texture all the channels from the particle color and we're going to feed it into the emissive color and that's it that's all we need you should have something that looks kinda like this you can see it doesn't really look like much but it is what we need all right so we're gonna save and close and we're gonna do the same thing for this waves we're gonna right-click again create material and underscore waves will be the name open it up again same thing move this out of the way let's see move up here right click type in particle color I think I went a little too fast than the last one sorry about that in order to get rid of this very quickly you can just hold down alt and just click gets rid of it and then we're gonna hold down em left click get ourselves a multiply node hook it up to the all the channels all the channels put this into the emissive color and we want to make sure that this is set to unlit whoops unlit and additive we should get that there we go that's what we're named right there and now for the black hole we're gonna need the tiling noise texture but we're just pretty much gonna make this thing from scratch so I'm gonna make it from an image I'm gonna kind of show you how to pull in texture samples from the material editor so we're gonna right click out here in this empty space click on material M underscore Y hole and this is gonna give us an empty material now we want this to be unlit as well and opaque is fine the first thing we're gonna want to do let me pull up my notes here there we go first thing we're gonna want to do is pull in our texture sample so we're gonna type right click out here type in texture you pull a texture sample in and if you have if you've imported the tiling noise correctly or successfully you should be able to come down here to this texture and type in tiling noise you'll see this tiling noise 3 is the one that we're wanting there we go and we're gonna use a function called the framel function you're gonna right click out in the space and type in FR e and you're gonna get the 4 now we want the 4 now function it's got a little extra stuff on it for us a little extra parameters that we can mess with and we want to have this for now function to face the camera at all times so if we rotate around or anything like that that the the black hole is always looking at us essentially and how we can do that is you can grab the camera vector and plug it into the camera vector and then we're gonna want to create a power parameter so we can modify this power later on just case if we want to do some fine tweaking so we're going to right click and type in scalar parameter we're gonna call this from now we're gonna hook that up to our power I will set a value on that a little later I think can I get you showing everything here so we're gonna be doing a lot of multiplying and adding so we kind of just give ourselves some extra space here all right now our texture sample isn't doing anything right now even if we were to multiply this stuff together we really don't have a whole lot so make it a little more interesting we're gonna apply something called a panner and that is gonna do pretty much what you think it's gonna do is it's just gonna pan up and down the texture depending on what values we set so we want to right click get a pan turn we're gonna hook this panner into the UVs and then for our coordinate we're gonna get the screen position there we go see this pan er here we're gonna set the Y speed 20.2 so that's going to tile it in the y-direction you can set these kind of however you want to although we're just gonna leave it at point two for now cuz I kind of like that and then now what we're gonna do is create some more parameters so we can modify this texture down the line we want to be able to control things like the black hole color like the actual black part of the black hole we also want to control the outside color of the black hole as well so in order to do that we're gonna need to create a particle color node color oh there we go and also another parameter as well so we're gonna right-click scalar parameter we're gonna call this glow intensity there we go and we're just gonna multiply these two together more multiply stuff don't want our lines to cross if they don't have to there we go keep it nice and clean so we have this multiply here and we're gonna take this multiply this stuff together there we go and then we're gonna multiply this together I'm gonna hold down em and just left click multiply that together there we go and we also need a black hole color so I'm gonna hold down the three key and get a three vector and we're gonna right click on this and convert to parameter so there's lots of different ways to create parameters in your in your materials we can just create a parameter by just right-clicking out here and just typing parameter we can get all these different parameters here or you can right-click on a node and convert to parameter stuff like that so we're gonna call this parameter black hole color and then we're gonna add these together so I'm gonna hold down the a key left click add and add all right now we're not gonna get anything because we haven't modified any of these any of this power or any of this glow so I want to change this Fornell power to like a 15 I think and this glow I think I had it set to 25 there we go that's looking pretty good yeah yeah now if we wanted to change these parameters later on we don't have to dig into this material and I'll show you how to create a material instance where we can basically just make copies of this material and modify any that we want them we set his parameters so Oh looks like I set this to a didn't need to do that so let's change that back to black bowl color and I'll go ahead and modify some of these for you so if we wanted to say change this to like a red yeah we'll set the saturation up you can see here we're changing the black whole color looking pretty cool set that back to black and to show you that this particle is particle color is working I'm gonna hold down 3 left click we're just gonna hook up this color node or this 3 vector that our act is our color node into this section and then we will change this to say like a pink some kind of pink color there we go so we can see as we're changing this color this outer ring here is the color is changing and we want to control that with the particle color so when we're in the system we could do all kinds of things we can change its lifetime color over lifetime that sort of stuff it can be very dynamic when it comes to this color so let's hook it back up there we go and that's it that's all we really need to do here for this black hole there we go we're gonna click on apply and save and we're gonna close and I want to create a material instance out of this so we're gonna right click on our newly created black hole material and just select create material instance in this name I think is fine it's just going to be M underscore black hole underscore instance and we can open it up now we have all these parameters over here on this right side those the parameters that we set inside the material and we can override and get into these material into these parameters sorry that we can change these colors to whatever we want just like we did inside of the material editor so let's say we wanted to make it uh let's make it up blue yeah we should gotta come over here to like this blue color there we go just to show you and then we will save it close it and just to show you that we can have two of the same we could just modify the material instance without modifying the base material is that I'm gonna just drag and drop it in just to primitive spheres and we're just gonna drag our black hole material and click it right on there and you see we have our black hole and then we can have our blue black hole right next to it so we can modify the instance without modifying the base and then we can come in here and let me pull this out of the way and we can change this for nail power we can bring it down a little bit here so we can see the differences so you could really tweak with this if you wanted to we'll set that back to 15 let me bring it back in view for you there we go so I want to change this if you mess with colors quite a bit and you just want to revert back to the default values there's this little arrow key or this arrow button here you can just click it and revert back to the default there we go nice close and get all that out of the way all right that's it for materials so looking pretty good now we need to get on to making some Niagra emitters and then we're gonna make a whole bunch of them above I think 4 or 5 or something like that and then we're gonna compile them all into a system and that's going to be our black hole so let's get rid of these things here and inside of our particle systems folder not in the materials we want to right click go to FX and Niagra emitter in this niagara emitter that we want to create at the start is this upward mesh burst click OK and we're gonna name this pn4 particle emitter Niagra underscore and let's start with the black hole so we'll call it black hole and we'll open it up now yours may look a little different than mine you may have like a weird background that is from the preview scene settings options and if you don't have a preview scene settings I believe that's in window and you'll see preview scene settings in here and we want to uncheck this show environment this may be what you're looking at at the start so I like to have the black background personally and the control scheme inside of here is a little strange so in order to get back to the normal Yui for control scheme you want to click in this upper left hand corner click on the drop down arrow and just uncheck this orbit mode and now you can hold down right click and sort of pan around and use WASD to move yourself around there we go unfortunately you have to setup that that orbit mode every time you open up in a bitter so hopefully they changed that at some point so we have a lot of stuff going on in here and we need to turn off a whole bunch of things and I like to keep my stuff pretty organized so I'm gonna be doing this quite a bit you're gonna right click up here at the top and just select collapse to headers here we can get now a nice overview of everything that we're working with and the black hole itself isn't gonna be moving at all it looks like it's moving just because the size of it is going up and down but there's no velocity or anything like that being added to it so we're just gonna trash the add velocity in cone and that's gonna delete it and we're also going to remove the salt forces and velocity 1 and there we go okay now let's go ahead and change our mesh renderer so they're gonna unfurl I suppose our our Niagra mesh renderer properties and then under the particle mesh we're gonna click you're gonna type in sphere and there's quite a few spheres in here the one we're looking for is out of the engine basic shapes so if you read the path it'll say engine basic shapes that's the one we're looking for there we go and then for our material we want to choose the black hole instance material so you have an extra one in here let's see which one do we want that one right there right particle systems materials there we go there we go there we go looking pretty good so far now we could start tweaking this to make it look more like a black hole so the first thing we're gonna want to do is change up the scaling so we're gonna right now it's set to a to 1:1 scale we're just going to set it to just one across the board there we go so now it's just gonna face the camera already looking better this spawn burst instantaneous we don't want to spawn a hundred black holes we just want to spawn one there we go since these were stacked on top of each other you can really see all the other ones but we don't need more than one for right now and we're also gonna need to change the color and this let's see we're gonna change the color let me pull up my notes sorry yeah okay so we're gonna change the color and we're gonna change the mesh size scale which we have down here so the width with all these emitters we want to use them more like building blocks like modular pieces so we can reuse them later on in different projects and that sort of thing so we don't want to do all of like our hard animation that's gonna be tied to the system inside of the emitter we kind of want to just build like a pretty vague emitter that way we can reuse it and how we're gonna accomplish that is just by setting on the mesh size scale we're gonna start the time at zero and go at a value of one so we're gonna set the scale to one at the start and then for all these other time steps we're just gonna say something like on the time here we're gonna say point to get a value of one and at the end here we're gonna say time one a value of two oops value of one there we go so now what we have here is just a black hole that spawned it's pretty static and then inside of any system we put it in we could really tweak the mesh size scale all right now the color we want a static color on this so we're gonna go ahead and just go to your particle update color and we're gonna remove we're gonna click that little sorry we're gonna click this little reset to default value button and it should revert back to to this thing right here and we're gonna keep this at just a white color again we want this to be pretty modular so we're gonna change the color inside of the particle system yeah we're just gonna double-check some of these here okay we definitely don't want the lifetime to be varied so let's go ahead and just click on reset to default value in our particle lifetime let's set it to five there we go so we just have a nice static the mass we don't have a whole lot of velocity or anything like that flying around here so the mass isn't too too important but I want to go ahead and keep the mass in there just in case if you want to add forces to it and make it very very easy so we're gonna reset this one to default value as well and we're just going to set it for 1.2 all right I think that'll do it for for our black hole pretty simple stuff no big deal we're gonna do it again we're gonna do the animations and stuff like that inside the system so we're gonna hit compile apply and safe and let's minimize that oh we forgot the most important part which is we need a thumbnail so we're gonna click on thumbnail and click apply and save there we go I was really making quite a few emitter so we're gonna kind of want to see them at a glance so let's start with the mmm let start with the waves and we're gonna build a base wave emitter and then we're gonna copy we're gonna inherit pretty much a bunch of the properties from that wave a minute and then just tweak a couple of things so let's start again we're gonna right-click FX niagara emitter we're gonna do another upward mesh burst click okay this one we'll call particle emitter Niagra leaves work open that one up again your you should be on orbit mode it always defaults you to orbit mode so we're just gonna make sure we uncheck that and kind of get myself into view here there we go i'm gonna right click up here at the top collapse two headers get a nice overview of everything that's going on and up here at the life cycle i'm gonna set this to one thing five work for our next loop duration spawn burst instantaneous I don't think we're gonna need a hundred of these waves so we think more like three and let's go ahead and actually set our renderer so we're not just looking at these arrows here so we're gonna map all of these textures to a plane and then we're gonna rotate the plane around to make it look like it's like swirling around the black hole so under our mesh we're gonna type in plane and we want to try to find the same plane as we have been using and that is the engine basic shapes plane it's going to click on that and so if this thing disappears no big deal you want to click up here to show and we want to show the grid and we should be able to find we're just a hundred percent disappeared well we should apply a texture to it let's go and apply our waves texture to it so in our materials we're just gonna click the drop down here and type in em underscore reuse and we'll select our waves texture I'll let that load should have something in here where did it go I'm going to compile apply and save I've had an issue with working with planes and it just disappearing for some reason someone to close this open it back up there we go I'm gonna click on show show me the grid takeoff that orbit mode I'm going to see if I can find it again Oh hmm let's modify some stuff first and then we should be able to find it so up there it is right there okay so at least we know we're in the right area all right oh there we go there we go no we're coming back let's get rid of this velocity in a cone let's get rid of our solve forces in velocity there we go we don't need any kind of velocity or anything like that going on and now we're going to set some rotation as well I can get my my particles back let's say compile there there it is sometimes I got a hit compile and do all that kind of stuff and let's see if we can get it back there it is right there so let's get a nice overview shot so we could really see what we're working with here and I'm gonna go ahead and clamp our time line down so if you don't know you could just click and hold this time line and you could just move it around if you want to I'm gonna clamp it to about two seconds so we're gonna hover over two seconds and you're gonna come down here and click on this little bracket and that'll shade off everything on the right of it and then we just have a loop between those two sections so we can have it happen real fast okay so let's go through we have our spawn burst done we want to set a initial rotation on these and we're just gonna be worried about like an orbit rotation so we're gonna be worried about the yaw rotation kind of go over the differences or how to conceptualize those in your head a little bit a little bit more concretely anyway so in order to add a new module to particle spawn we're gonna click this plus sign make sure you're lined up too with the particle spawn because sometimes if you're like up here you know if you have everything collapsed and you kind of you click up here to like emitter update and you're looking for like rotation nothing's gonna pop up and it's gonna be kind of frustrating so just make sure that you're lined up there with particle spawn we're gonna type in rotation we're gonna set an initial mesh rotation and we're pretty much just concerned with the yaw here and we want there to be a range on this yaw we don't want it to just spawn at a static value so for example if I just set this to 180 it's not really all that interesting you want these particles to spawn at least somewhat different every time so in order to do that we're gonna click the little drop down on y'all and we're gonna type in range and we're gonna select a uniform ranged float and we're gonna go from 0 to 360 there we go there we go looking a little bit better there and then we also want to rotate this on the yaw axis as well on the update so it looks like it looks like it's spinning that's gonna be important as well so under the particle update we're gonna click the add new module and we're gonna type in rotate and we're gonna set the mesh rotation rate again we're gonna select the yaw and we're gonna set this to I think we're just gonna set this to a constant value we're gonna say negative 360 high Rico so now we're gonna get this kind of spin the direction of your spin should be determined by your texture so if it looks like your texture is spinning clockwise then you'd want to set that to the positive end and if it looks like it's if your texture looks like it's gonna collapse on the opposite and a counterclockwise thing you want to set something negative I mean for things like yaw pitch and roll if you want to conceptualize this a little bit ease here I think of it like holding your phone in your hand and you are just rotating your phone in the sense that you're like spitting it in your hand and to do a pitch you'd want to move your wrist closer to you or away from you that's the pitch of it and then the role is you moving it side to side so you have your pitch yaw and roll so for this we want the yacht to spin since we want it to look like it's orbiting the black hole alright so we still have some other values that we need to fix up here we need to change up this lifetime I think yeah okay so let's set this to a constant value we're gonna reset under our particle spawn we're gonna go to particle lifetime and reset it I'm just gonna make this a constant value and for the mass again we don't have any velocity or anything like that being set in here so we're just gonna reset this and just set it to a constant just in case if you want to add some velocity in here it's just gonna be in there for you there we go that's looking pretty cool and we definitely need to set up the color so let's go to particle update color and what we want is a color from curve so under this make linear color from vector and float and click this drop down and go to color from curve now because of the way our material is set up it's an additive material and what that basically means is anything that's black is going to become transparent so we don't have to worry about opacity at all with this texture or this material so we can just click down here at the bottom this is all of our opacity down here you could just delete it and we want to set this to we're gonna set this to fade to black or fade its transparency down so we're gonna set this time to like 0.9 0.9 and we just want to set this to black so so moved a little faster sorry about that we're gonna right-click on this choose the time it 20.9 and then choose color and under this value we're just gonna set it all the way down to make sure we're set to black and then over here on the Left I'm going to right click and add a key to all curves I'm gonna delete the opacity right click it set the time to zero and this color I think we'll just leave it as white so we'll set this value here to just just as widest is white and again we're going to build modular pieces that we can reuse later on with the idea that inside of this particular black hole system we're gonna change things like the color and specific things to this system inside of the Niagra system and not it not exactly in the emitter okay let's change up this size scale a little bit maybe maybe add in so we definitely want a few things to happen with this and it because we're gonna be making so many emitters based off of this one we can kinda want to use it as a template so under the mesh size scale we know we want our rings and one out pretty much everything in this system to start from a zero on the scale pop into existence and then scale down into nothing so at the end I'm gonna right click and not right click sir I'm just gonna left click select the time to one and then put the value at zero at the very end there so it's gonna balloon up and then it's gonna collapse back down and we'll tweak these values a little later on okay so I want to make sure that our initial mesh rotation is doing exactly what we're doing here I think we're okay 0 to 360 360 or 360 I think that'll work yeah let's do that oh we could tweak that a little later okay uh I think we're all done I think we're all done in here let's compile apply and save it and do the most important bit which is take a thumbnail apply and save minimize that we should get a little weird looking thumbnail right on now for the next two we're gonna be making emitters based off of this wave emitter that we just made so same process as before we're gonna right-click visual effects or FX ready and we're gonna select emitter oh excuse me and we're gonna select copy an existing emitter from your project content and in here we're gonna be selecting the waves emitter just like - okay and this one is gonna be called particle emitter oops the limiter in my accra underscore will say this is the textured waves there's only a few things are gonna be different about this wave so we're just going to flip the texture and that's pretty much it and we'll set up everything else inside of the system so the default viewport here because we're working with planes and the way the default viewport kind of is set up is that you're looking directly on to your particle system so because we have a plane there's no z-axis so we don't really see anything it's actually believed it's like up here but it's not a flat plane so you can't see it so you can very easily lose your emitters when you're working with planes so a couple of tricks here turn off your orbit mode click on show go to grid you want to hold right click move your mouse down just a little bit and just tap s a couple of times there it is up there it is right there and we'll just kind of hit the W see if we can find it oh there it is right there a little annoying to find but we're working with planes you can't really see them so you got to make sure that you're you get the right orientation and whatnot okay so we want to just change the material that's on this to our textured waves so we're gonna come down to the Niagra mesh renderer properties go to and go to the material em underscore textured waves particles there it is let that load in there we go that scaling looks a little off to me what's going on oh that's because the scaling here and I bet you that this waves one also had this yeah that's what was causing them so we want to change this scale to make sure it's just one across the board I don't want to stretch it or pull it or anything like that's why I looked a little off alright so for this one I like it we're gonna change a bunch of stuff inside of the system there we go and then let's make another one so if we're gonna call this one the vertical waves let's open this back up what we need to get a good some nail give to the most important part here let's see where'd it go save that's a terrible thumbnail oh well alright let's make a new emitter and we're gonna copy an existing emitter again we're gonna select our waves part of the systems waves and we're gonna call this one triple emitter Niagara vertical open this one this one's gonna be a little bit different we want this to be the swirly waves that are around the black hole so in order to get that we're just gonna modify a couple of things again you gotta get lots of practice here and trying to find our plane meshes so we're gonna come up here turn off our orbit mode click on show go to grid right click move your mouse down just a little bit tap s move messing a little bit more tap s up there it is right there and we're gonna kind of hone in on it oh all right now we want to set the initial rotations so that it's gonna like look like it's wrapping around the black hole in order to do that we're just going to remove this y'all here and we're gonna set these pitches and rolls to two just to some values and I can kind of show you here when we do to 180 why we should do some just some ranged ones so we'll click on that little arrow the arranged uniform ranged float zero to 360 there we go come down here make another uniform ranged float on the roll zero to 360 there we go getting a little crazy scale is still not doing very well but that's okay gonna make sure to double check that scale for some reason mine isn't inheriting that's okay all right what else do we need to change we're gonna change the pitch and roll and the rotation rate is still at a 360 don't think that that is updating the way it should be oops let's find it here okay now now we're looking okay so let's kind of scrub through here and make sure that we're doing what we want oh I know let's up this count here to send up at 12 there we go there we go I can really see it happening here there we go so we're getting like this random chaotic rotations and stuff like that happening and we're spinning them all on the yaw so it looks like that they're still orbiting I like it I like it let's see life time like a mess with that a little later I think let's move on to the stars stars add a nice little touch to this and I think is probably my favorite part of this of this whole system so we're gonna make sure that we're gonna compile and save oh we need take a thumbnail thumbnail perfect perfect apply and save oh look at that I know exactly what that is all right uh let's make a new emitter last emitter I promise and instead of a copying existing one we're gonna select a create new mitr from the emitter templates and we want these hanging particles click okay and we're gonna call this particle emitter Niagra underscore Stars open it up and so by default orbit mode by default basically what we have here if we click this bounds box is we have a bunch of sprites that are just spawning in a very big area and then there's a little bit of noise happening to them so they can move around and that's pretty much it a little crazy what we want though is to have an orbiting set of stars so in order to do that we want to remove the sphere location because we don't want any Z on this we want them to be orbiting around our black hole so let's trash the the sphere location and I could barely see those let's go ahead and set the variable on by what is it the sprite size there it is we're gonna set this to like I don't know let's say 5 to 10 I really want to be able to see them there we go and we're gonna just add a little bit later everybody else we can kind of just get a nice pan here so we can really see what's going on with this box volume so you can see here they're spawning in a box pretty straightforward but we don't want any z axis on it cuz we want it to be flat and then rotating around our black hole so let's remove the Z you can see now we're on a nice plane looking good and this is a bit big so let's say this is 175 to 175 pretty small area there we go there we go let's see sprite size the lifetime lifetime we're gonna set to like 1 to 1.5 OC I like that that twinkle kind of thing going on and all right let's mess with the best evolving noise let's do that this curled noise here we don't want so let's delete and we don't need any drag force let's delete that to permit just gonna spawn a twinkle in and out and we're gonna add a new module to particle update and we're gonna find the vortex force and see here it's giving you an error and saying that that there's unmet dependencies and the unmet dependency is the solve forces and velocity which may seem a little strange because solve arses involve forces and velocity is sitting right here but you have to think about these emitters as a stack of instructions that execute from top to bottom so in the particle update we're gonna do the age then we're gonna do the scale set the color solve for forces and velocity and then apply a vortex force that's out of order we want to solve the forces in velocity last so we can just click on fix issue and that's just gonna move it up on the stack you can also click this header and just move it around if you want to also another way to fix it so right now we don't really have anything going on because our force just really isn't strong enough so if we did let's say let's see if we did like 500 see a little something is happening now but actually what we want here is to set this to like a negative 500 and this pole amount wanna set this to 50 there we go oh that's not not happening again so we're gonna uncheck it check it again there we go there we go and see here now we're getting that pull in for our black hole pole that's what we want and now let's let's get that spin in that rotation going on so we're gonna go to particle update add new module and we're gonna look for vortex velocity again unmet dependencies we're gonna fix the issue you see it's already happening up here swirls looking already pretty good just straight out of the box liking it so far this fall off I'm change that to about half of half of what it currently is of 0.5 and then the velocity amount changes to a negative 35 so I'm gonna get the slower rotation which I like quite a bit in this force amount with the way that we're gonna be doing this animation we want to ramp up the force amount over time so we could either change it here or we can keep this a little more modular and and just change it in the system so we're gonna change this in the system itself you know leave this here and now these aren't looking too much like stars because their color is a bit off we can Trash this color over lifetime and we're just gonna set them with a color I think be the best thing to do so we're gonna come back here to particles spawn I'm sorry I deleted the the color module from the particle update and then we're gonna go to particle spawn color set the color and we're gonna make this a very bright very very bright color so we're gonna say 30 we're gonna go 30 and then 20 there we go very big glow kind of going on here and now see this may be a bit much you can see like lo this is these are really big stars it's because our sprite size is so big so we're set this down to the 0.9 to 1.5 there we go so we have like this twinkly small stuff kind of going on I dig it I like it alright let's set ourselves a good thumbnail applied and safe it looks kind of like stars alright so now we're gonna combine all this stuff together and really tweak our values so let's make a new system I'm going to right click go to FX go to Niagara System and we want to create a new system from a set of selected emitters and you're gonna find all of your emitters in here I have duplicates of everything because I had that example at the start so I'm just gonna really try to make sure I don't grab my old ones let's see particle systems and you're just going to select your emitter and then click they add the green plus down there and particle systems waves we want the textured waves as well there they are we want our stars particle system stars and obviously the black hole let's see particle systems there we go and I'm just going to click OK so make sure we got the black hole the stars the vertical waves the waves and then the textured waves quite a bit of stuff and for this we're gonna call this TSN particle system Niagara underscore black there we go you can see straight out of the box here we're looking pretty good and we're gonna turn off this orbit mode set this up here kind of go in and out and I'm gonna collapse all the headers make sure that this is all spawning correctly doesn't look like it so let me make sure so when you're dealing with multiple emitters things can get kind of noisy pretty fast and a good way to isolates effects is either by selecting this toggle so if I just wanted to see this black hole I could just look at it here or if I have everything selected I could just click on this little person here and it says enable isolation for this emitter so I should be able to just see the black hole there we go okay so we'll worry about if if these things aren't showing up a little bit later I kind of like it the animation done and whatnot so as a Niagara has some problems sometimes when you're importing emitters and it's not applying correctly and also the a lot of the renderers just don't seem to show up when they're supposed to so we'll just kind of worry about and troubleshoot it a little bit later okay so let's select our black hole make sure that we have our black hole selected and we could verify that the black hole is selected up here at the top and we want to create this this expanding black hole that thing collapses back down and how we're gonna do that is just through this mesh scale mesh size scale rather all right so in here let me pull up my notes again for the black hole there we go so it's quite a few things to add to this curve and I'm just fitting the curve here and then I'm just gonna zoom out a little bit give myself some space and we're gonna select the very first node at time zero and we wanted to start at zero because we want it to increase there we go that's what we're looking for and then we know at the end we want it to be at zero so this is something that I really like to do we're gonna set the time to zero point five eight and set the value to zero this way it gives us a start and a stop to work with and let's go ahead and set our second 20.2 at 0.95 this is going on for a very long time I'm just gonna set the I'm gonna clamp this down so we got to get this repeat happening so we can see stuff a little bit faster there we go that's looking pretty good so let's add another key to this curve you can just right click on the curve add key to curve and this one is gonna be at times 0.5 and at a value of one point four okey doke and let's see we have 0.2 missed one here so we're gonna right click between our first two add a key this one's gonna be at zero point one and we're gonna set this to one point three so we're gonna get this rapid increase a little bit of a decrease and then increase again and then a quick collapse so we're not quite seeing that collapse because we have it clamped down so let's take our clamp grab it here move it out of the way there we go let's reselect my emitter here now this isn't quite smooth so what we want to do is select all of our notes here or a little keyframes here and right click on them and select Auto and it's going to give you a nice smooth curve in between and then now we could take these tangents and just move them around a little bit until we get something that that we like you can modify this however you want and you can get some pretty crazy effects by just changing some of these tangent lines let's work with that I like that so basically I just changed the second to last one and I just increased this angle but just a little bit here I think it was set up to baby here so you say as I increase this I'm gonna get a little more of a little more of an oomph before it there we go let's go and change this color as well and the color will be a nice pink color but you could change us to whatever you want and our values are going to be three point five on the red zero on the green and two point three on the blue and this nice pink color I dig it and that's it that's it for the black hole we made me some little bit of tweaks to the to the size and scale so let's see if we can maybe get everything else working here so we have these waves here what aren't my vertical waves working let's see might just have to re-import them let's see here vertical waves vertical waves seem to be working inside of my emitter alright let's right click on these and delete and we're gonna add a track emitters we're gonna select vertical waves again just to riad it let's see if I can get him to come back here where are they oh are they just super tiny I think they're just super tiny yeah they're just super tiny okay that's the problem that's no big deal okay let's uh let's just do the normal waves first so make sure you have your waves selected down here and your in your timeline double-check it up here on the top and let's go ahead and change the color first I want that real nice blue color and we're just going to do Willie a mrs. blue and we're just gonna taper it off into a much tamer blue so we're gonna right click on this first note here make sure your time is set to zero and go to choose color and under blue we're just gonna select 100 crazy emissive blue and I think here yeah it's our set variables under our scale there we go and her scale is just really off here wonder why it's so off let's see they have the right plane basic shapes plane hmm it's just super small let's see I just set this to a two to two just want to be able to least see it before we start making modifications to it let's turn off our black hole it's a little distracting there we go okay so let's mess around with this color okay so I've ran into this problem with the color before where you don't quite you're modifying different different RGB values and for some reason it just it just doesn't want to add a key to all of the all of the frames or all of the colored lines rather so what we're gonna do is select this show this curve in the curves tab and what we can see here so we have a little bit of a mess up we're gonna select all of them hit delete and then at the end we're gonna right click Add key to all curves I'm gonna delete the opacity this ending is gonna be a 0.9 I think it's what I had it set to let me double check yes 0.9 I'm going to right-click over here add key to all curves remove the opacity right click it go to x 0 choose color and this color is gonna be that super emissive blue serving us up 1 1 and then 100 to blue and for some reason I still have these white values still coming in it's very strange see here see what's going on here in this curve gonna fit this curve get rid of there we go so I'm gonna get rid of the other frames here I'm just gonna work directly in this curve editor I've had a lot of issues with these curve editors before all right so we're just gonna right click in here and just add a key to the color curve blue and at time 0.19 we're gonna set this emissive color to 20 so we're gonna really ramp it down I'm going to right click here add a key to 0.6 at the time and the value will be 1 so we're just really gonna ramp it down okay now we're looking looking pretty good we'll see if we cannot get that to happen on the other waves and let's go ahead and mess with this scaling as well we're gonna set the first one make sure it's set to 0-0 second one we're gonna set it to 0.23 on the time and 1.3 on the scale there we go and then the last one we're just gonna set this to a value of 2 so it's just gonna stretch out for a pretty long ways so we're gonna explode up and then slowly taper down we set our scale to 1 1 and 1 get it back to normal that's looking pretty normal let's bring our black hole back in mmm black hole's looking a little big and make sure my scaling is right on the black hole so we'll select it here looking okay let's see what our first value is 1.3 is that looking good 1.3 it's just a little big let's turn it off for now and I'm gonna set the values and everything else and then just modify the black hole scaling and just to see if we can get it all to fit and tie together alright let's look at these textured waves and the textured waves we want them to be a bit bigger than the other waves that we have two blue ones so the first thing I'm gonna want to do here is I'm gonna right click on this white here on the color we're gonna set choose color and we're gonna make this like a pink we'll do we'll do pink I think it's what I had originally set for this and the first one is going to be a 0.5 on the red 0.05 on the green and 0.41 on the blue it's gonna give us a nice pink color to make sure that I'm gonna add the key to all the curves here so we're gonna runner the issue that we did with the blue one I want to right click add key to all curves and delete the opacity right click on this node and we're gonna set this to 0.38 on the time go to choose color and we're gonna set this to 1 on the red 0.14 5 on the green and 0.786 on the blue let me see here let's turn off the vertical waves and we'll turn off the Stars as well okay is that it on the color yeah that looks like it's it on the color let's look at this scaling so what we want to do is we want this this this textured wave to sort of balloon out quite a ways and then collapse back in and we can do some stuff to it at the very very end to sort of give you like a poof kind of effect so on our first verse our first frame or first curve right over point on the curve here sorry we're gonna set the time to zero point one set the value to zero point nine five and right-click add key to curve on the next time we're gonna do 0.25 at a value of 1.2 to fit this here so I can get an idea here so we're gonna come up in size and then we're going to slowly come back down right-click add a new key to this curve 0.5 on the time 0 9 5 on the value and for the final time I'm gonna set this to 1.6 and when I say negative 2 they don't want to grab all of these I'm just gonna click in here grab them all right click and make sure that auto is selected that's gonna give us this ability here to just modify them just in the same way as we did with the black hole there we go so as we're modifying this second to last one here what we can do is the more steep you make it the more of that poof you're gonna get at the end let's turn off that wave so you can really see it see that poof there and if we change it in the other direction there we go if we just get it right in the center you're not really gonna get much at all at the very end there and down a little bit there okay so let's look at this guy I don't want to change this just tweak it just a little bit see how that looks okay I like it let's bring back in the black hole black hole is very big it's very big I think black hole is the problem let's see let's see what we can do here let's change the black hole make sure my scaling sizes are okay and it's my mesh scaling size it's not 5 should it be 5 on this one here five - it's looking better not quite all lined up though in terms of terms of the sizing and whatnot so we're just going to change this scale curve here sort of balloon up the scale a little bit if you're using different plane primitives or you have like a slightly different sizes of things you're probably enough to come in here and really do a lot of fine tweaking to make sure everything lines up really well okay so let's bring in the waves let's see what that's looking like and they're pretty small too so let's go ahead and jump up this scaling there we go let's look it pretty good I like it yeah there we go alright so let's work on let's work on the vertical waves vertical waves are very very noisy right now let's zoom in on them let me go ahead and clamp this down so we can just get a good see and what we want to do as barons just change the color on them and maybe change the sizing of them so they just barely wrap around that black hole so let's make sure we have our vertical wave selected double-checking up here right click collapse to headers and let's change the color pull up my color notes where's my vertical waves there we go and again we're just going to change the start here make sure our starting color is at zero choose color and the color here will be on the RV 0.864 on the green 0.166 and on the blue 0.64 it's nice pink color now we're going to right click out here add key to all curves delete the opacity this time stamp we're gonna say zero point two one five choose a color and this cozy b1 on the bread 0.41 on the green 0.85 on the blue right-click out here add key to all curves the opacity right click it on the time 0.45 choose the color color will be 0 9 3 on the red 0 on the green 0 5 1 on the blue so we need to get this very dark pink there towards the end all right now let's bring in the black hole you can see that it's just not at all coming in so let's change our scaling there we go so we'll just set the scaling curves to and I want to remove this stop here move that down so we get the full effect here maybe a little closer well there we go let's see we can good yeah okay there we go all right let's change up this size scaling so again we definitely want to have it start at zero so I'm gonna make sure my time is set to zero on our first key we're gonna set the time to zero point one nine and the value to one point one and out here we're gonna set this time to two at a value of zero let me fit that curve looking pretty good do you have this nice kind of swirly effect I like it I like it alright let's bring in everything except for the stars and let's just see how we're looking here ooh it's spinning very fast let's kill the rotation rate on a lot of these so let's go to let's go to the textured waves we're going to scroll down here to the mesh rotation rate and see this mesh rotation rate is set to one let's set it to point one there we go there we go let's also change the waves mesh rotation rate 2.1 okay let me change fiddling around with some numbers here there we go this could be a little bit faster maybe a little bit bigger always got a tweak with your numbers here there we go and then our vertical waves booo i changed the verdict aways see didn't check myself here it's supposed to go to the waves change these waves will set these back down to one maybe one point five sets of two okay okay we'll do some fine tweaking a little bit later let's go to get the stars done alright bring them in I mean they're already looking pretty okay here the lifetimes a bit long I believe is what we really need to change because they're just sort of lingering around so let me pull up my star notes make sure that we have everything set correctly on our stars you to right-click up top collapse two headers let's go look at our set variables here 121.5 that's looking okay spawn rate it's the spawn rate we want to do a spawn burst so in our emitter update let's click on add spawn burst they can't delete modules out of a system from an emitter that's a part of a system so we're just gonna set it to zero and uncheck it and reset the spawn count to a hundred and I want to make sure that looks like we're getting multiple spottings of them ah we're gonna set this max loop count to one so we're just gonna get one spawn of these and that's the only thing that we're interested in and there we go looking pretty okay let's see here what other little values can we tweak I mean we can tweak stuff in here for four hours I spent several hours just tweaking values over and over and over again just to try to get something exact the way I was looking and whatnot so we can tweak all kinds of stuff in here we can change like the star life time we can do bigger on the textured waves maybe we want to make those just a little bit bigger so we'll set this down to 0.5 on the oh that's a vertical wave let's go to our textured waves come down here to 2.5 let's make it just a little bit bigger and on the waves here maybe bump up this rotation rate like 0.5 we could do something like that these values you could really just mess around with but this at least gives you a blueprint so to speak on to something that you could just mess around with yourself and really just start fiddling around and tweaking these numbers it can go real crazy on on some of these you can make some really cool effects by just coming through here and just messing with some of like these scaling values here you know if we just what are we in here we're in the waves so we can set this value to something like to make it a lot bigger [Music] 1.4 we can make it drop down a little bit slower if we want it to something like that I kind of like that already you kind of wish I like the whoosh at the end all kinds of stuff so let's go ahead and compile and save I'm gonna move this out of the way should be able to just drag and drop this into the world now and there we go we have ourselves a little blackhole system that isn't repeating itself that's okay we'll just bring it back in here we have this wonderful blackhole system that I think it's just an absolute tons of fun we have tons of different emitters in here that you could tweak all kinds of values you could have more stars less stars you can make that pull amount like so much bigger you can make tons more stars if you want to you can change the textures on this you can have much better textures than what I managed to make and in like 10 minutes or so but yeah so I think that's gonna wrap it up for me if you have any questions comments or any sort of suggestions or anything like that please let me know and if you make something out of this you send it to me you can just post it in the comments or just send me a message happy to take a look at it absolutely love this stuff thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Daniel Murillo

Views: 4,983

Keywords: vfx, niagara, ue4, tutorial, vfx breakdown

Id: UtUWcAy34Ds

Length: 70min 22sec (4222 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2019