#UE5 Series: Introduction to Fluid Simulation in UNREAL Engine

hello everyone Reza here with another Unreal Engine tutorial in this step-by-step tutorial we're going to make use of two very powerful tools the Niagara VFX system and the level sequencer inside Unreal Engine to create a simple Dragonfire effect and the result will be ready as a cinematic piece as usual this tutorial is packed with tips and tricks on Niagara as well as cinematics in unreal so without any further Ado let's get started [Music] thank you as usual let's start by preparing the scene this is the dragon that I use for this particular tutorial it's created by trunk CG I put the link so you guys can check it out it's an incredible rig I've gone ahead and put a very simple animation in there there are a lot of problems in there so apologies the idea is not to really work on the creature animation is just to have a subject so we can move on with our tutorial so what I did I geometry cached it and then I exported this as alembic into Unreal Engine the other character that I'm going to use is from mixamo so if you go to mixmo and search for doozy you should be able to find the doozy character now what I did I brought it with a with an act attached an animation and exported as fvx so once that's done I actually brought the two characters in there put together a scene and again the scene is just a bunch of Mega scan assets nothing too specific and I'm ready to go now before we start with our project because I'm going to use extra nodes within Niagara we need to enable certain plugins so I'm going to go into edit and plugins and in here I'm going to search for Niagara and make sure that Niagara fluids is enabled it brings the Niagara toolkit and make sure niagara's Sim caching is also enabled because that allows us to put Niagara inside um level sequencer so we can start animating it once that's done you probably need to restart the engine and you are ready to go also you can see I have a few folders already created in here want to keep my level another one to keep my material to keep my props so I brought these two characters into props I've got an empty folder for sequencer I've got a folder to hold my textures for the dragon and an empty VFX folder so I can create my Niagara system and network in there so everything is very organized ready to go so let's go to the next chapter and actually start putting together the nodes and move on with our tutorial [Music] let's get started first things first I want to create a Niagara system I would like to create an empty system because I would like to add emitter myself and hopefully you all have watched my hour long video on all the dunes and those you need to be mindful of when it comes to Niagara systems so prerequisites it is to kind of have a basic knowledge of Niagara system so we won't go over basic modules and attributes again I'm going to press finish and I'm going to call that NS for Niagara system fire I'm going to double click on it and dock it right next to my scene all right I'm ready to go you can see there is no emitter here so right now everything is inactive I need to add an emitter hopefully you already know you can right click add an emitter or my preferred way is just to press e now once that's done you go to parent emitter and you can see now we checked those plugins and activated those plugins now we have access to a long list of presets ready to go emitters so we don't need to build everything from scratch having said that we are going to heavily customize these effects to be able to get the desired look so I'm going to go with the grid 3D gas Master emitter and if I double click on it you can see I have the emitter working for me so it's basically a sphere and that emits smoke and density to put it in a better technical term and it's quite buoyant all right first glance if I look closely here at the emitter itself you can see emitter update is empty particle update is empty so there is no modules in there but then we have a bunch of presets and those presets are going to help us to see the result right here now you can see that everything is locked because it's actually taking order from its parents which is part of the template that we loaded now if you ever want to tweak these manually and have access to them it's actually quite easy you just right click and you go remove parent emitter and all of a sudden all of these attributes will get unlocked and you can actually go ahead and tweak them but for now we really don't want that we just want to start from scratch and shape the emitter now what differs this from similar software packages let's say like Maya is you really can't turn this emitter inside Unreal Engine so if I want to bring this emitter here and start rotating at 90 degrees so it points towards the right direction we want the dragon to emit fire on this poor guy well that's not going to work because it looks at the attributes if I go to emitter summary it looks at the velocity it looks at gravity and tries to figure out where the smoke is going to move so just rotating it is not going to do the trick we actually need to push the Smoke on the X or y-axis in this case to be able to get the desired look but before I get into the technicality side of things let's uh let's have a look at this emitter right here and see what we have to begin with if I go to emitter summary I have access to all the necessary tabs to get things going first things first simulation defines what you are simulating are you simulating smoke or density or you would like to simulate fire which is temperature and those are here so that's the first decision you need to make also at the same time you need to think about your boundary this red box here which you can enable and disable right so I need to come up with a number that works for my scene and also it helps the smoke to be pushed in specific access if need be so right now it just moves up and this boundary box is more of a vertical boundary box I want this to be more of a horizontal bounding box so first thing I need to do is to change this world size of this bounding box to be able to get things going um I am going to put some random numbers in there and I'm going to definitely tweak that because I really wouldn't know what number works for me so let's uh sort of um stretch that in y-axis because I know my y-axis would be the longest one the fire should be emitted from the left hand side to the right hand side so this one gets the highest number and for the um height I should say or z-axis I'm going to put something like 250 but I'm pretty sure I'm going to change that all right so far so good so we have the boundary box let's actually move the emitter to the left hand side as much as we can and that can be done by changing the local pivot so I really don't want to move it in x-axis if I come here I really want this to be at the center of my container so X we don't want to move I definitely want to move it in y-axis to push that back a little let's see if that is enough maybe 3 8 or maybe three five works for me um I'm gonna try four maybe four three yeah that's uh that's as far as I can go without actually getting into the boundaries and you really don't want to do that because this emitter cannot live outside the boundary and if there is any cut off you actually will see a seam so to be safe I'm just gonna go with uh value 0 4 2. now for the other one Z let's try um to bring this down just a tad yep that should work for me so I positioned the emitter in the right place now let's think about how are we going to push this a density along y-axis there are a few ways of doing that we have some really good um forces available to us in the forces tab to be able to get this done but before I get into that I'm gonna introduce these tabs really quickly because we are going to go back and forth and knowing what tab does what is actually quite important so we already talked about simulation density temperature and how fast density Rises buoyancy how fast it vanishes or dissipates dissipation rate and we have dissipation rate for density dissipation rate for temperature ready to go re buoyancy for temperature buoyancy for density we have in Source anything to do with the emitter so we have the position of the emitter local limit position which is going to be ticked for us because we're working on a a sort of local access coordination emission radius is how much you would like to emit from this emitter and that's a very very important attribute disabling it will disable your emitter if I put something like 20 you can see we are lower the emission now and 75 is going to help us to achieve the result now something really strange is happening here maybe you haven't noticed it but we have the reset button and we have another reset button now this reset button is the parent emitter reset button and this reset button is resetting the value to what you loaded to begin with so if I click on this to 50 we still have the green one because we still differ from what the parent emitter asked us to do so these locks become quite important and if I click on that then we're setting everything to what the parent was dictating now definitely we can change this there's there's nothing wrong with that but just be mindful of these two and what they do so in the forces scenario we can add force field we can add turbulence we can bring in some vorticity which we are going to do Collision deals with collision and in here we have boundaries and start playing around with z-axis for example in here I'm gonna go and open up positive Z you can all of a sudden everything hits the boundary and sort of deflects as opposed to just moving up and die so that's the option that you have available render deals with anything shading wise both for your density and for your temperature obviously for temperature we're dealing with the standard black body which controls the look of the fire that can be changed and in render density we deal with all right how much of a gain or opacity you're dealing with for the overall density for your Albedo you can give it a range so on and so forth as well as smoke color and then we have some less important for this particular tutorial tabs where you can override the quality you can debug and at the same time you can see all of these attributes at the same time all right let's deal with the direction of our smoke and then we can move on to the next chapter and put final touches into the Niagara system one thing you should be mindful of is never rely on this display 110 percent sometimes you bring this smoke into your scene and you see a slightly different result so it would be a good idea to drag and drop your Niagara system early on and always sanity check when you think the result works for you another thing is definitely save as often as you can well I'm saying this I might as well save to be able to move on because one thing I noticed is some of these nodes are still working process and they can crash on you at any point of time who knows maybe it happens to me for this particular tutorial as well all right the direction of the smoke the easiest way to get that going is by using the most powerful force inside the simulation tab there are again many ways such as velocity to be able to push the smoke my preferred method would be definitely gravity so right now gravity forces the smoke to go up and this is a standard gravity that you see in similar software packages what I can do is to change that so I am going to change that to probably 100 so it goes a little bit down but at the same time I need to push it really really hard in why so I am going to start with a crazy number something like 10 000. and of course 10 000 is pushing it to um positive I need to go to negative so negative 10 000 if I can type and you can see all of a sudden we have this vigorous push in the negative why and again it's um it's out of place you know the buoyancy is not there it's just too thick too much emission at the same time and they're hitting the boundaries one way is to extend the boundary but do we need to extend the boundary is something that we are going to check in the next chapter so I am going to save this and in the next chapter we're going to bring this in to our scene and we are going to tweak our emitter to get a desired look thank you all right let's put that into our scene we're definitely gonna get some really funky result but that's totally fine uh we're just really at the beginning of the whole thing so yeah you can see our poor doozy is getting completely destroyed and disappeared it's more like an exhaust pipe or some sort of a Industrial scenario where you see super thick polluted smoke coming out of some industrial buildings nothing like a dragon fire and that is expected all right at least we know what we're working with and now it allows us to go back and forth and have a look at the result every time you make a change here and save you can go and see an instant feedback in the meantime doozy stay tight and just enjoy the smoke all right first things first uh we just don't want to use density we would like to use temperature as well and temperature brings the fire Vibe into our calculation so let's enable temperature and as soon as I do that it compiles and you can see we see elements of fire in there but the smoke is too much to a point where we barely see fire so let's go all the way start from the top and see what changes we can make resolution Max it changes the density of the cells in our longest axis so it enhances our quality it brings more detail into our fluid system and while it can be very tricky for some mid-range computers to handle it let's just be gentle with it I'm just going to increase it by 100 and you can see we definitely get more detail you can go up to 400 450 but I noticed after 500 cells everything becomes very unstable and even hard to process so go easy on this never put a crazy number like 1000 in there otherwise more or less you're at risk of crashing not to mention the scene is going to slow down significantly now this pressure solve is very very useful it calculates the number of solves per emission and its accuracy versus speed so you get better collisions you get more accurate result at the same time you're seeing may slow down now I'm gonna take the Gamble and bring this up to 12 um to enhance the Collision side of things but now I'm a little bit at risk of Unreal Engine shutting down on me so I'm gonna keep an eye on this if necessary you can reduce down to 10 I noticed 10 would be a sweet spot 12 is a bit of a stretch but we'll see how we go I'm going to constantly save then we have density buoyancy and this is something that we definitely need to address I feel like it's very buoyant and it can go forever I can even double the y-axis of my boundary but it's still going to reach that area so I may actually tone this down quite a fair bit for now I'm just going to start with minus 0.4 but you never know I may actually change it down further maybe 0.3 will be a good number I am going to play around with the gain so I'm not really too worried about these guys fading at the moment so that should do the trick now with temperature is the hero of the effect and this this density eventually needs to cater for the temperature so I feel like having this set to 0.5 is just very very low I'm going to increase the temperature to a very high value and you can see it's really pushing the density to the edges which might be the result that you want but definitely uh at this point it's really not working for me I will pay attention to that and I'll make sure that whatever I do works well in the meantime I'm just going to snap back into here just to observe and see what type of look I'm getting all right now this compensate for actor motion is very very useful I won't be using it but in case if you wish to move this up and down like so you can see the fire is not reacting it's very rigid it's not really reacting to the movement as soon as you turn this on and this is something that you definitely see in so many of these scenarios now the fire is actually reacting to the movement of my boundary very useful but it's computationally can be a little bit expensive and you definitely need to compile it before you go as you may have noticed that when I enable it it says you have to compile it compiles it and then it goes it can be very expensive so don't use it if you don't need to now I'm going to dissipation so dissipation is quite important how soon you want the smoke to dissipate don't confuse it with buoyancy buoyancy is the initial push how fast or how quickly your fire creates and gets created basically but buoyancy defines a but dissipation defines how quickly it fades out how quickly it dies and this is something that you kind of need to be careful about I can you can go negative if you want for this particular example I'm just going to go with zero and see how it reacts and for dissipation rate for temperature I may set that also to zero to see how it reacts okay not too bad we can certainly do better but let's move on to other tabs because there's a very significant change I would like to make I'm not sure if you have noticed but this emitter is way too big for the dragon's mouth and as soon as I change that everything else will tone down and this is a direct relationship between the emission rate deployancy and the size of our emitter and you will see me going back and forth and changing some of these attributes to be able to adjust my effect now in here with our sphere source which is the shape of the sphere we would like the emitter to be active and enabled and of course have all the necessary attributes ready to go the non-uniform scale is what I'm targeting and emit radius is also very very important now with this non-uniform scale I really don't know what would be the magic number so let's start with 0.3 0.3 and 0.3 and everything else will tone down as a result of that and now you can see um why having this attribute is very very important I'll go and quickly check how it looks in the scene so um yeah not too bad would be a better option if I put everything in a timeline so I can check but I feel like it's not too bad it's going well the dissipation also works kind of well but I need to make a decision on what exactly I want to do with the density so the fire shows better but you can see what I was talking about a slight difference between the viewport here and the actual level there's a slight difference in terms of the look so anything that you change you definitely need to go back and have a look all right for now um it's not too bad it's working for me I can go in there and specify how much density and how much temperature I would like to get now density is way too much you may have noticed that I'm almost getting just smoke and the density value is set to 5 which I think it's a very very high number so I'm reducing the density and even the temperature is still I think too high so I may go and reduce that to something like three I'm going to save and let's have a look I'm getting a slightly better result but I really would like this fire to actually reach the character so what I'm going to do and every time you want to elongate your flame best friend is emit radius I'm just going to go and put 100 in there and it gives you an extra push which actually looks quite nice also I feel like the emitter is still a bit too big so I'm going to reduce that to 0.25 and remember every time you do that it will have an impact on your emit radius and it will have an impact on the level of density and temperature that you have in the scene I'm going to save I'm going to have a look and yeah the fire does reach at some point maybe I need to increase that to 120 and re increase the temperature to something like four and even reducing the density to something like one let's go back and have a look yeah that definitely is better I quite like that now next up is forces and in here you have some really really cool attributes to play around with and to deal with and we are going to make use of it now the first one that is super useful is vorticity I'm going to probably increase that to three and that creates small vortices into the scene but also I would like to create some chaos and your best friend for chaos is always turbulence now turbulence is going to give you the main waves there's sinus waves as well as the chaos that you bring with vorticity so I can just increase that to a very high number just to test and now you can see chaos is everywhere I really like the result right now so with that out of the way you can see I'm gradually but surely moving forward and stepping into things that I like maybe 0.3 was a bit too much so 0.25 the original value I think kind of 2.5 I believe the original value does work for me um and with this turbulence frequency I feel like I can definitely push that really really high to just bring more chaos into the scene now with regards to some really important attributes in there with regards to this turbulence gain you can actually gain down your turbulence why are you setting it to a very high value I found that it's actually quite useful slight touch on that is going to have that little bit of balance in there which is good now I really feel like I need to go into source and make some adjustments in there so first one is temperature for temperature I feel like it's a bit too much so maybe three should work for me for a mid radius I feel like it's emitting now too many or too much rather so reducing it down to 100 gives me a little bit of balance in there everything else more or less looks good and we can always go back and tweak around with some of these attributes I'm going to go into simulation to see what I can improve to get a better result maybe buoyancy of 0.04 for buoyancy for the density is a right move here now again it's really hard to see exactly what's happening I need to save and switch back into the scene and you can see more or less the smoke is uh what it bothers the character I really don't want to burn the character I just want that to be the smoke I guess we are in a position to add some final touches in the render and the rest we can fine tune once we put things on the level sequencer so I'm just going to quickly pay a visit to render to see how we can change things in this very important tab it's it's a decision you need to make if you would like to go with the fire look or if you would like to change that fire look to more of a Sci-Fi look and or let's say I don't know a toxic poisonous green look um just to you know have fun with it and add variety at this point I really don't have any brief so I can just go nuts and change stuff you know no one's going to ask why so just for the sake of demonstration so you guys get to see how this works let's actually go through that I personally would preserve the fire look and more work more on the fire look but for now it's an opportunity for me to explain more about this incredible system so let's go ahead and change that fire look to something else now to change this black body obviously non is not an option because you're completely going to kill everything blackbody is the default fire look the other one is curve that allows you to actually put a color chip and customize the look of your fire or whatever you want to call this at this point because we are going to change it of course you can just toggle the snapping here so I can just have snap enabled and it snaps if you want more delicate movement you can go with that you can change that to curve this display here and really play around with your RGB values but if you want something that it's kind of visually easier to read definitely you can go with that now the way that you change this is by just double clicking on it and now you have access to all the um you know all the colors that you want for example I can sort of change that to a a toxic um type of fire I don't know why it's toxic maybe the green and you can even change the value to something like 1.5 so it actually emits light as well so you're really crunching the um the value or actually pushing it high up to be able to create some indirect illumination for your fire and you can see now it actually does illuminate the scene and Lumen does a fantastic job of showing that now with the smoke right here I feel like I can tone down the opacity of the smoke because it's just way too thick and now it's a lot um transparent you can even go and push that to something like 0.4 and I feel like this white doesn't really go well with the color of my fire the new color that I um that I came up with so I'm just gonna change that to something that makes more sense maybe slightly darker color yeah that should really do the trick I don't mind that and of course we can always go back and change stuff you can bring other colors into the mix if you want to it's always an option and the beauty of that it's at any point of time you can go and you can see I'm bringing some yellow into the scene now you can totally see that you can even go that and change that to something like blue yeah it's just uh spreading some blue now which is good maybe this 1.5 is a bit too high maybe 1.25 is a better number it was just way too bright and if I check that you can see it's coming together nicely now the smoke is not as thick so you can see the the process is really the focus of this tutorial and how gradually but surely I'm getting closer and closer and closer to the final result now I definitely reached the level where I need to see things in action the character the dragon character gets closer during its main pose to the other character so I really need to check if the fire is too close if my emit radius value is too high if the buoyancy is there so let's go to the next chapter and put everything into our level sequencer I've got a folder ready to go so let's move on to the next chapter and take care of that now first things first I need a level sequencer and again I have a a video or a tutorial and the the entire video talks about level sequencer and all the do's and don'ts you need to be mindful of I put the link to that in the description below also so you guys can access it if you don't know anything about level sequencer I highly suggest you to watch that first you can pause the video watch that and then come back and continue so we don't spend the time on all the basics because we've already covered that but for this particular one I am going to add a level sequencer I'm going to go into my sequencer and I am going to call that seq for sequencer underscore fire just a simplest name possible now let's bring all of our characters and bring the Niagara system into level sequence so that's going to be quite interesting because with characters it might be straightforward but the Niagara system that can just throw some curve balls on you and you we need to see how we can plan that out now first character is our Dragon so you have two ways of doing this simple drag and drop or select your object via the outliner go to track actor to sequence and because you have selected this that would come up as an option here for you now on a good day if you play by the rules bring in the skeletal mesh and then your animation and bind them together as an fbx the sequencer will detect the animation so that's no problem something that we are going to test with our doozy character in a second but this one I geometry cached it and I export it as alembic so this the process is slightly different and again I did that intentionally simply because it's another excuse to talk about something new something that we haven't talked about what's going to happen if you geometry cache your animation how are you going to bring it as an Olympic so the process is actually fairly straightforward I'm going to click on the track and because I have geometry cache when I imported my animation I made sure that the geometry cache was selected the sequencer can now access that geometry cache as soon as I click on it I have my animation ready to go so that's good I noticed that I need to relocate and change the position of my emitter I will definitely do that simply to get a better read if I can somehow access the scene I keep clicking on different things okay let's find our Niagara system W to move and and ring it to the scene now while I'm at it why don't I check the radius to make sure that the radius works for me yeah that's actually not too bad it certainly it definitely works for me at least at this point but I can always go back and change that I'm just going to ever so slightly move that in z and y just to position it better that gives me a better read and now it's a lot easier to see what's going on it's a lot easier if the fire can actually reach the character and you can see the the incredible Collision that happens because of the solver rate that we increase from 6 to 12 now we're getting a really really nice Collision first character done let's bring doozy so um let's see happy that's that's the doozy character of course I need to be in my very first frame otherwise you start right in the middle you can drag and drop it you can go to track and bring the character this way it really doesn't matter now if I go and check surprisingly you see there is no animation and you would be surprised why because we already brought the skeletal mesh we did the bind between the geometry and the animation why it's not really looking at it simply because the animation track is empty and in here you have to go and address it every time you bring a skeletal mesh this is something that you should be doing now I have two from mixamo and I noticed that this take one is broken so if you are following this tutorial with the exact same character you can go with this Maximo one and that works well I was talking about the playback head not to be in the middle but to be in here and of course I made the same mistake but that's no problem you can always go and just snap it back to frame one and you can see doozy is now um very sort of cheerful uh you know it couldn't really care less about what's going on which is kind of funny by itself um I thought I would just bring a little bit of contrast into the scene so if I just play you can see it's just having fun idle position not doing anything specific all right so the animation is there for the dragon and for doozy let's bring Niagara um the process is still very straightforward so I'm going to select my Niagara I'm gonna make sure that I'm in my very first frame go to track actor to sequence and add Niagara now that's the part that it gets a little bit confusing because Niagara doesn't have any other sub layers like animation or transform you have to add them manually so thanks to the plugin that we enabled right at the beginning of our tutorial if I press on this plus I have now access to Niagara components that gives me access to certain components so I can just tweak few attributes so I'm going to click on that and it brings the Niagara component but again it just doesn't do anything because you need to go one step forward and that is if I click in here you have access to certain stuff not everything just certain options at your disposal you can transform you can play around with cast Shadow effect distance field you can tweak the mobility right but one of them that is actually very useful is this Niagara system life cycle track if I bring this one here that actually allows us to enable and disable the Niagara system at certain point in time which is very very useful I feel like I need to extend my timeline because I no longer see what's going on so if I go through this you can see now we do not have any emission and as soon as I hit this point I have my Niagara system and I want this to be cut off here maybe so that's easy I'm just going to bring this one back and you may feel like alright it's done however if I play it just cuts off with no sort of follow-through in the flame it's as if we press delete on it so very very unnatural also I noticed that it wouldn't harm if I translate that emitter F so slightly because it pushes back so would be a good idea to go in there and drop in a transform so we can be a little bit more accurate with things [Music] feel free to change the interpolation you know in at the moment it's sent to cubic which gives you tangents to overshoot but at some point you probably don't want to have any easing or ease out in that case you go linear and of course you can just switch to curve editor and tweak things further for this particular animation we don't want to spend too much time on the animation that should work for us but again this is quite annoying where the fire disappears really really quickly I probably don't want that and I feel like I'm reaching a level where I can just add further tweaks to this particular um flame and looked of it even better so let's go to the next chapter and make final touches to this Flame finalize it code in the code and then deal with this cut off effect that we get inside the level sequencer [Music] all right back to Niagara system now I can spend honestly hours on this just to add final touches bring in some particles work on the Shader some more but I don't want to spend too much time on it so let's just tweak few attributes and then deal with more important stuff which is animating Niagara inside our level sequence so one thing that it can actually be improved is the unused portion of this container you know I didn't know that I would reduce the size of my emitter to something small so now this um if I go to simulation this 1200 is certainly a large value to deal with let's see if I set that to 1000 maybe 1100 is better and in the meantime I am going to save yeah that's that's definitely a better option um also another thing that I can probably help with is the dissipation rate density if I set that to a super well 0.5 you can see I don't get any density for the smoke so that wasn't really an accurate value maybe 0.1 I just want to cut off a little bit of smoke early so it doesn't live forever yet that's definitely a much better option I don't want the puff of smoke to sort of reach the end of the container was a bit of an Overkill maybe uh 0.15 is a better value yep I'm gonna go to source and I really would like to add a little bit of velocity in there and this is just a push that I will get for the fire uh which is our temperature so that is definitely a much better option here and yep it's actually not too bad if anything I really would like to increase the it's very tempting to increase the max axis which is our resolution of the fire just to get more details into the scene now that definitely works but every time you change max resolution you need to a little bit be careful about the level of dissipation and you need to be careful about your emission rate so it's always a trade-off now I think if I reduce that to 95 that should give me a good result yeah I still would like this to reach the character so I might as well stay at 100. all right um I'm in a good position to call it a day because again you may have noticed that I'm going back and forth and I can honestly stay half a day on this uh just to be able to get the result that I want but I think you guys got the gist you guys know all the key attributes to Target now so let's uh go into here and let's talk about what we should do to be able to control certain attributes that we don't have in our Niagara component what I really would like to do is to have a fade-off effect on this emission to be able to control the emit radius this is the one that we need to Target and somehow we need to find a way to bring this attribute into our Niagara component inside the level sequencer and this scenario is something that you will run into one way or another when you want to keyframe an attribute and add that attribute is not key frameable um just to show you if I go in here into Niagara there is really no way of keyframing this in here so we don't have any options to keyframe any of these properties inside the Niagara Fire And even if I want to do that in here using the good old keyframe I still can't and despite the fact that I have the Niagara system On My Level sequencer there is no level sequencer icon popping up right next to the attribute certain attribute just like you know lights when we bring in lights we always get the camera sequencer icon where we can keyframe them directly from the properties detail panel we don't have that option here either so that's the part that many many many of my students get confused they don't know where to move forward and they just settle on just a simple fire Vanishing and they just called it a day now there's a really easy way of keyframing any of these attributes and that is by using something very useful creating a user parameters Now using a user parameter happens inside your Niagara system not Niagara emitter so let's talk about that you can if I zoom in I'm going to hold down control and zoom in now there is a way to add your custom user parameter to be able to add to your Niagara system now in Unreal Engine 4 there was a plus button here where you could add a custom user parameter in Unreal Engine 5 it's actually down here and this plus right here allows you to add a user parameter now the user parameter that I'm looking for for this particular example is float and the reason I'm picking float is because I may go decimal values and I need to bank on that that okay if I want 2.75 the float value is still going to cater that for me I'm going to call that custom user pram for parameter and all of a sudden I have a custom user parameter now how to link that into my emitter is also quite simple what I'm going to do by the way I'm going to select the user parameter and make it the same value as the attribute that I'm targeting again the attribute that I'm targeting is if I go to source is emit radius and it's right now set to 100 so I'm going to make that 100 so now there is no difference between this parameter and this parameter they all do the same thing and all you need to do is set to the emitter that instead of driving the value from this live feedback drive that from your custom user parameter so I'm going to make sure that show all is selected and I'm just going to search for our custom user parameter now all of a sudden instead of running it from this live feedback I'm running this from the parameter and because those two values match I technically should not see any changes whatsoever you may say Rosa what's the big deal what just happened now well we can bring this into our level sequencer all of a sudden we provided a situation where we can actually Target a very specific node on level sequencer that's fantastic let's go back and if I now go to Niagara component the Plus look what we have custom user parameter and you can actually bring that into your track so I'm just going to move to the very first frame and then go into Niagara custom user parameter and this is keyframeable Believe It or Not So what I'm going to do I'm going to start by adding a default keyframe and then keep that for a good amount of time maybe it's fading now to a value of 80 and then it around here it dials off to something like zero and of course for that I need to increase its life cycle now instead of you watching me tweaking these keyframes I'm just going to pause the video and I'm going to readjust some of these keys and we can sort of put final touches and finalize our tutorial [Music] so I I ended up actually I noticed that I'm not getting the result that I want the force that I want so I ended up pushing the gravity a little bit and reducing the emitter to a slightly smaller values from 0.25 to 0.23 and I feel like it's now it's a much better fit for the Dragon so if I look at it from this Angle now and play Rewind you can see I'm getting a better result obviously there is still tweaks need to be done but you know for three minutes I think it kind of works okay but you can see how easily I can now go back and forth and tweak some of these attributes to my advantage and get the result that I want in no time at all so if I look at it from this angle as well you can see it hits the character really well and they fade out is gradual from one to another keyframe using this custom user parameter that we used so that's all good let's drop in a light into the scene so maybe a point light and perhaps I'm gonna go and kinda use the same color in here now it's time to bring it to the sequencer so I'm just going to drop in the point like camera sequencer and I comfortably have access to its intensity you can see the intensity is right there and all I need to do is to line up the intensity of my light to the fire the emission of the fire so I'm gonna go in here that's the fire starts emitting and I'm going to click on the intensity and it can go on all the way to hear with intensity of 0.5 and of course it dies after the fire Fades away so I'm going to set that to zero the intensity and it creates a keyframe for me so um that's gonna work just fine and of course right before that I'm going to set that to zero so it only Shines on the character when the fire emits so let's rewind maybe slight delay so let's have a look something like that so you can see how much play you get from some of these incredible options that you have available inside the level sequencer and the whole idea behind this tutorial was to show you the amount of flexibility that you get when it comes to level sequencer and how you connect certain attributes and options from your Niagara system and you bring them directly into your level sequencer just to be able to make them keyframeable and to be able to customize certain attributes over time that should do the trick for today's tutorial I really hope you found this video useful and use the techniques you've learned to your advantage and until the next video see you guys later

Channel: SARKAMARI

Views: 5,789

Keywords: ue5 tutorial, ue5 tutorial for beginners, ue5 course free, ue5 full course, ue niagara tutorial, ue niagara fire, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, fire unreal engine 5, dragon fire vfx, unreal sequencer tutorial, unreal sequencer animation, unreal engine 5 niagara sequencer, ue5.3, ue5.3 preview, unreal niagara tutorial, ue fluid simulation, unreal engine, unreal engine vfx tutorial, epic games

Id: HxL7Qwvcfjg

Length: 58min 46sec (3526 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2023