UE4 - Tutorial - Foot Steps / Dust / Poofs!

hello guys and gals and welcome to a new tutorial in today's tutorial we are going to be going over these nice little food poof yay feed poof's so we're going to be setting up a particle system and then attaching these to our character so that we poof whenever our character hits the ground so you can see they're quite stylized but obviously if you wanted to go for more realistic approach you could make some more realistic particles but for this we're going to be doing this nice stylistic little poof which is quite cool now a lot of people when they set this up they'll be doing it using line traces we're not going to be doing that that's a total waste of resources you don't need to have any sort of blueprint support for this so let's do it let's get into this first thing I'm gonna do is I'm just going to remove all of it off-screen hahahaha so that you guys cannot see bings out of order so we're just gonna get rid of those and press save on that little guy there yeah okay so first thing I'll do is I'll just right-click and were just gonna have a I love leather folder we'll just call this poof's alright so I am going to provide you with the static mesh that we're going to be using which is this little guy here just SMA underscore poof let's just get this back on to the correct screen here we are a seed here is a poof get out of here manikin little people you see here it's literally just a couple of low poly spheres that I've just stuck together and this is going to be our poof huzzah that's our lovely little mesh so this is what we're going to be using to make the particle system I'll provide a link in the description so that you can download this rather than making your own but as I say it is just a few spheres that I've stuck together so we have the mesh hopefully you've downloaded the mesh person we're going to do is we're going to make our material so we're going to right click material we'll call this and underscore what poof like so and we'll open this up and now to get the nice little stylized thing that we had in the start we're going to be switching our blend mode over to translucent and we're going to use that we're going to leave this as default lit because this is going to be more of a dust we are going to be having our lighting effective so if we're in shadows it will look darker so we're not going to be using emissive so we're going to leave this as a default and lit and what we're going to do now is right-click and say particle color like so and we're going to plug the color straight into base color now we're not going to be using the Alpha for the particle color we're going to be running our alpha directly through a dynamic parameter and to do this what we will do is we'll right-click and we'll find value step and we'll click result into opacity like so and now to set this up what this is going to do is it's going to look at a gradient and then it's going to look between the values in that gradient and change the value based on where a scalar parameter is here we've just got a half a circle like so because by default we have our default value at negative 0.1 and there's no gradient in there if we were to ot and left-click for a texture and then under the texture we will find noise we'll use T underscore noise oh one this is our starter content so you should have this if you don't have this then just open up Photoshop and render clouds and you'll get the same sort of thing now this is a scaler switch needs one value we'll plug the red channel in like so and then we're going to right click and search for a dynamic parameter and what a dynamic parameter is is it's a set of four values that we can change over time inside of our particle system the influence of the material and we're going to plug at the parameter 1 into mask offset value and by default this is going to be 1 so when our update previews we should just see almost a full circle because this has got some pure black in there so we will have a couple of little empty spots which is fine we're going to highlight paramah 1 under the pram name and we're going to call this erode and we'll press apply and now our lovely material is ready oh you can see we've got a couple little holes in there oh and one thing that we do need to quickly do because we can see through this entirely it's just turn on two-sided and apply we have this set to a two-sided material we have a value step we have our particle color a dynamic parameter and we have our mask in s weakened OSIS down that's our the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to make our particle system and we're just going to get rid of the old preview whenever we're going to right-click particle system P underscore what yeah we'll just drag this into our world and we just going to line it up with his foot for now just so that we can see this as a little preview and we're going to double click our particle system to open it and now we're not going to be using sprites so what we'll do is right click type data new mesh data and this will give us a default mesh cube and we're going to change this we head to wherever we've got our mesh UI mesh here and now you can see that we have our nice poof's but they're a bit big so we're going to do is we're going to say initial size let's open this only so you can see what we're doing initial size a maximum is going to be 4 on XY and Z and the minimum is going to be 2 but because we have four different values here we will get some that are stretching the rib but we want these to be the same so under locked axis we're just going to lock axis x y&z and this will make sure that our XY and set values are always the same so that none of these things look too deformed now if we look you know we now have so much smaller proofs but still they're running up his leg we don't really want them to be running up his leg and the reason this is happening is because we have an initial velocity we're going to turn that off and now our poofs are just going to sit down at the bottom of his foot where we put the actual particle system we don't want them to always be in the same spot in the easiest way that we're going to make them poof outwards is by right-clicking heading to location and then selecting cylinder by default the cylinders going to be quite large you can see here now we are getting some nice poofy action but it's a little bit too far away from his foot this is like mega super dusty so what we're going to do is select a cylinder and we're just going to drop a start height down to one we're not going to drop it to zero we're just going to drop it to one because we need to be able to have a little bit of a rim on there so that we can have these things affected by the cylinders and velocity if we were to scroll down underneath cascade we have be a 3d draw mode and return this on you'll now be able to see the actual cylinder here so you can see it's a one unit high cylinder but our radius is still 50 which if we look is a bit too large so we're just gonna lower the stand maybe five and yes we'll have a 10 radius an agency that we're getting the really localized poof just around his foot which is great that's exactly what we wanted yes now we don't have our material on here so what we're going to do is we're going to right-click and then under material we're gonna select mesh material we're going to click on mesh material add a new element to the array and just drag our foot poufs material in there it's going to take a couple of seconds just for this to update itself because by default our flags will not be set up if you were to scroll down with the material open and get to our like usage here you can see here it's updated mesh particles for us it's turned it on BC this little arrow means that that's not its default it's because the engine is updating that forced when we've automatically at what it's doing it what to McFee automatically when we've put the material on to the mesh in the particle system so that's just going to update for us it might take a couple of seconds for that to happen so we're going to do some other stuff in the meantime we're gonna head back to our cylinder and what we're going to do is we're gonna have these things poof outwards the easiest way to have these proof outwards is with our cylinder selected if we were to scroll down we can find a velocity if we turn this on we now have a little bit of velocity I think our particles you can see here they're starting to move outwards and their constant velocity scale is set to one if we check back in here it's not very far at there poofing outwards and now you can see that we have indeed but our little material on there proofing material cool so now that we have our articles move excuse me it lost my voice a little bit now we have our particles and moving we're going to have to change their lifetime because this is now lasting you're far too long so I left home by default is point is 1 & 1 so they always last for one second you can set this to maybe 0.2 and 0.5 so some of them disappear a lot quicker and some of them take a little bit longer to disappear and the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to add in that erosion you can see right now they're just lasting the entire time they're not a roading they're always just the same shape we're going to right-click add to our parameter and add a dynamic parameter here open this up with our dynamic selected you can see here now we have all possible options which is what we had inside of our material you can see it's just called none and this isn't now going to get a little bit confusing for you guys if you don't update this what we'll do is under dynamic right click it refresh module and it will update it with the names that we gave is we should have a road and then we should have around 2 / m3 and / m4 now we were only going to be using a road you can see here it's just set to a constant of 1 so it's always going to be at 1 what we're going to do is change this to a constant curve and immediately our particles will disappear the region reason that they've disappeared is because our curve has nothing in the array so we're going to click this twice on for a start point and one for an end point we'll open this up and you can see that both are set to 0-0 now we know from the preview that we need a value of 1 for these to show up but because we have two different values at 0 we're just getting the final value so we're going to change at in value of the number 1 to 1 and I can see they fade out at poofing yay and eroding as our but you can see here we get in this nasty triangular shape and this is because all of the particles are in the exact same orientation they're all spawning with the exact same rotation so we're going to right click rotation and it will mash rotation and now they're going to spawn between a value of 0 and 1 which is a 360 degree rotation so now we're getting some nice variation in there yay now if we were to go here you can see it's just constantly palpable purpura flip if they just keep on coming like it's spraying these proofs rather than they're actually proofing out it's what we're going to do is we're going to head to our spawn we're going to set our constant it's ball rate to zero we now have no particles but under our bursts we're gonna add one element to our burst list we're gonna open this up and I can't we're going to set this to perhaps 10 we don't too many set this to 10 like so and you can see here we go oh just getting this nice poof of 10 particles poof poof cool puffing out words enough for my liking so we're just gonna head back to this cylinder and under the velocity scale we're just gonna set this up to something a bit higher ten it might be a little bit high yeah maybe what we will do is we will right-click head to acceleration and add a drag and why drag is going to do is going to take our particles and slow them down until they're reaching zero and we're gonna just of this until we just get like a nice quick poof at the start maybe three point five some of them is still going a little bit faster me before how you go for so now we're getting this nice quick poof at the start and they slow down towards the end but we want these to float up with a little bit because they are going to be quite light so we're gonna right-click acceleration constant acceleration and we're just going to give this in the Zed maybe 200 because they're not going to last very long okay do want them to poof upwards like so in quite a rapid motion now again that's nice little poof cool now these are quite bright they're quite white there now it depends on whatever color you want to have these be you can set them to whatever you wish what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna open up the color of a life and we don't actually need a color of life because we're not using the alpha room we're not gonna change these so we're just gonna delete it our particles will disappear don't worry right click color initial color I'll come straight back and now we just can change our initial color to something a bit eeeh apps like though I've got this nice murky color I want to get this exact color it is one in red point eight five nine in the green and point five four seven eight in the blue air we are and now we've got this nice murky color there poofing alright so we have our particle setup lovely our particles are doing what they need to do their pooling the next thing that we need to do is we need to actually assign these a to a mesh so we're going to press save on our to run down our system because we don't want to lose these warm in Oasis down or select our player character now if you're not using the standard mannequin that's fine this is gonna work exactly the same way select your character and we'll open up the skeletal mesh by double-clicking it and I can see this is our lovely little character here up at the top we're gonna head to animation like so and this is going to open up our animations and add any animation blueprint that might be currently in there or blends that are in there what we're going to do is we're going to locate any one of these animations where we want a poof to occur so we're just gonna use run now you can see it's going to keep looping our run animation we're going to click pause down the bottom oh and we have this big red square or rectangle down the bottom and we can track this to preview the animation so what we're going to do is we're going to locate positions where his foot hits the floor like yeah yeah yes we're going to right-click this area we're going to add a notify play a particle effect we're going to select this because you know it's asking us for a particle system so we're going to grab our foot poof like this into the particle system like so and you'll notice nothing happens and the reason nothing happens will get told if we press save oh no big error the slot is one shot it's set to looping so what we need to do is have back to our particle system you can see if we go to required and scroll down emitter loops are set to zero which means this is going to loop infinitely so the engine knows that we're trying to spawn a particle system that's going to keep on looping on a looping animation so we're just going to have infinite infinite particles the engine knows that that's a bad idea it's what we're going to do is gonna change the middle loops to one tonight only place once in a you see says completed down at the bottom here completed that means it is completed all of its loops and it's starting the emitter over now you can see here we also have kill on deactivate and kill on complete we're going to turn these on just to clear up the particle system once it's completed even though the loops are gone and we're getting a complete shop in here completed means that it's just finished but our particle system will still exist in the world unless we tell it to kill uncompleted now kill uncompleted it's going to get rid of that particle system from the world when it finishes so we won't leave anything lingering that you can't see that's gonna start eating up your resources well press save add vector to our third person run every press play we should see it poofing okay oof oof oof all right but we're only proofing on one step so what we're gonna do is find the other step here you'll notice that that's playing via the particle system in real time as we're dragging through that's fine it's gonna play roughly when we're actually in play mode but in here we can't change how quick that plays in this preview let's don't worry about that we'll find where the other foot hits I'm about there right-click add notify play particle effect and again select the particle effect and to stick out poof in there because I already had the poof selected I can use asset from content browser or you can just click and drag that straight into there and now our poof is occurring on both of these if we press save so and press play as we run around we now get our nice and dusty poof as aha no need for any of this nasty line tracing who needs line traces when you can just put it straight into the animation like you're supposed to hahahaha so cheeky I'm so cheeky anyway right so you don't only have to do this for the run and it is gonna respect your blend so if I was to pick up a controller instead of the keyboard and just move slowly you see because it's not part of our walk animation it's not poofing but as we approach run it will start to poof as the blend is closer towards Irish will run now if you wanted to you could add one you could add this poof do any of your animations there for example let's open this back up and we'll head to our animations we will just stretch this up you can see here we have jump end this is where our character would hit the ground during an animation and here's the main main impact right there we could add and notify here obviously you wouldn't want to use the same particle effect just because it's not going to be quite as impactful it's going to be quite small because we've just designed it for just one of the feet you'd want another one but now you can see that we're playing that on our land so we can press save in the press play you can run around and it will poof and if we jump and hit the ground we didn't quite get a poof there it's not playing the full animation because the way the blends are working inside real gross just open that back up again see we'll play it a little bit earlier strike that down this dart just to ensure that it's going to go off Oh it's not playing it's not playing I don't think that that animation is actually being used in the blendspace not using that animation well stick it onto another animation just so that you can prove that I'm not crazy it will say manic in animation you jumpstart yeah what did jumpstart this one either inside of the animation blueprint obviously if you're not using the animation it's not gonna work if I did play it there yes poof there you go you can see it spoofing as we play at jump animation so just because the land wasn't being used inside of the thing inside of the animation blueprint I'm not crazy okay this works guys please don't kill me there we go that's how we can set up particles to be linked to our animation instead of using nasty ugly blueprints filled with line traces you don't need them you can also do other things such as place sounds I believe inside of your notifies so you can open this back up now you might want something to play at exactly the same time so we've got notify play sound so we can add our footstep sounds in here as well rather than doing that through blueprints and line traces because that gets really expensive you don't want to be line tracing every frame just to check whether or not your character see in the ground just put it in the animation you can play sound but you can see if we wanted to play sound at the exact same moment we can play the poof we can't because the poof is in the way that's what we can do is we can add and second track and by adding another track you can then add another notify in exactly the same place happy times hey there you go guys hopefully none of you are going to find that useful hopefully some of you will be able to use this so there you go go play with your poops have some fun with it yeah there you go happy Saturday or whatever day it is that you're watching thank you very much for watching I'll see you next time buddy

Channel: Dean Ashford

Views: 27,997

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, Gamer, Lets Play, PC, Console, play, playing, player, play through, play guide, guide, game guide, dean ashford, dean, ashford, UE4, Unreal Engine, Tutorial, Teaching, Teacher, student, indie, dev, developer, development, foot steps, foot poofs, dust, kick up

Id: CsPGUBgjuHY

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 15 2020