Niagara Visual Effects

 Author: Matthew Steinhardt


The Problem

It was about time we started looking into some special effects for our towers. Since the only functioning one at the time of tackling this was the flamethrower, I looked into make a neat fire effect. Unfortunately, I have zero experience making special effects in Unreal Engine, so I took to Google to search for some tutorials. There were... a lot! Trying to wade through them all to find quality information was daunting. Furthermore, a lot of information appeared to be locked behind paywalls. 

I eventually landed on a particularly promising tutorial that used Unreal's new Niagara Fluids System. However, this system is still in a beta stage, which makes it a little risky to use for our project. Regardless, I thought it would be a good learning experience if nothing else.

The Solution

I ended up going through the tutorial a few times as the effect didn't come out nearly as well as it looked in the tutorial. However, I have finally made a respectable special effect that will serve as a good basis if nothing else. At first the effect was not optimized in the slightest, and even spawning one of the effects would lag the game. I made some resolution adjustments which helped tremendously. I would like to look into some ways to dynamically adjust the quality. This would make it much more scalable. 

The effect currently consists of two parts. The first is a particle system that generates the movement and behavior of the flame particles. The second is the fluid system controls. This produces the smoke and fiery effect. By changing the density and temperature settings I can control the look and feel.





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