Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Thursday, 09-Jan-2025 02:41:33 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

   Man, figuring out how to manually position particles in Niagara was a huge PITA. Docs mention Niagara Data Channels and Niagara Data Interfaces but so much of it is out of date and / or incomplete it's kinda *worse* than it not being there at all.

   In the end I discovered I could do it just with user array parameters indexed with particle IDs, which *become* data interfaces, something never mentioned in the docs so making the connection was extremely hard. I feel a blog post coming on

   • Embed this notice
     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Thursday, 09-Jan-2025 02:47:00 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     in reply to

     I feel like "Here's list of points I'd like Niagara to use as particle positions" is not a particularly weird thing to ask, but I found nothing about it that didn't immediately get deep into the experimental API weeds (and already broken NOW), or extremely abstracted concepts. Not once did I find someone saying "yeah you can just bung an array param in there and link it up to particle index" so either I'm super dumb for not immediately knowing that or this is a gap in the cloud brain

   • Embed this notice
     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Thursday, 09-Jan-2025 19:08:20 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     in reply to

     • Craig P

     @Craigp I definitely need to write this up so that search engines can find it

   • Embed this notice
     Craig P (craigp@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Jan-2025 19:08:21 JST Craig P

     in reply to

     @sinbad Damn, I wish I'd known you were doing it, I learned it the same way and could have tipped you off.

   • Embed this notice
     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 10-Jan-2025 00:34:53 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     in reply to

     I've written up my notes on how to pass points manually to a Niagara system in order to exploit its renderers for doing non-simulated things - in this case a "throwing arc" visualisation element: https://www.stevestreeting.com/2025/01/09/niagara-particles-setting-positions-manually/

     #unrealengine #niagara

   • Embed this notice
     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 10-Jan-2025 00:50:40 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     • Parrot (Jeff)

     @psychicparrot42 👍 I'm trying to be better about sharing my tips as soon as I figure them out, I sometimes intend to "in the future" but by the time I think about it the moment has passed & maybe I don't remember all the details. It takes a little longer than my scrappy Obsidian notes but it's worth it

   • Embed this notice
     Ric (dev_ric@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 10-Jan-2025 00:52:32 JST Ric

     in reply to

     @sinbad you're manually positioning what now? 🤨

   • Embed this notice
     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 10-Jan-2025 00:52:32 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     in reply to

     • Ric

     @dev_ric Now with pictures: https://www.stevestreeting.com/2025/01/09/niagara-particles-setting-positions-manually/

   • Embed this notice
     Ric (dev_ric@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 10-Jan-2025 00:59:37 JST Ric

     in reply to

     @sinbad see, without the context of a game development, manually positioning particles sounds like a way cooler responsibility.

   • Embed this notice
     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 10-Jan-2025 00:59:37 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     in reply to

     • Ric

     @dev_ric 😄