#19 Niagara, or not (2/28-3/10)
This week I dove into Niagara, Unreal’s VFX system, on the hunt for a great flickering firelight to work into the wall sconces (and maybe other places too!). I’ve learned a lot about Niagara, how to build FX from scratch and how to create new FX, but so far haven’t been able to use it to do quite what I want.
First off, I did a quick search for a how-to on creating a flame effect in Niagara, found this one (in 12 minutes!! – it did take me rather longer myself) and had great fun building a flame effect from scratch and working it into the model.
I then discovered the default P_fire effect, included with Unreal, which did exactly the same thing. Great start. Regardless, I am glad I had the experience of making the effect myself, especially as I dove into the more-complex P_fire effect to try an convince me to show just the firelight and not the flames. I never did – as far as I can tell, the texture of the flames is what is emitting the light, and hiding or changing the flames particles (in any of the ways that I could try) also hid or changed the firelight.
Additionally, while changing the color of the standard light source in Unreal is a straightforward and only-slightly-cumbersome process, adjusting the color and intensity of the light from a Niagara effect seems to be something I need to do several steps (and go into the Niagara FX editor) to do.
I’m sure both of these are solvable issues, however the flame effect isn’t really necessary for the project to work, and not worth sinking any more of my time into.
Instead, I’ve moved on to start trying to get the 3D model printable. I’m not totally sure if that will be achievable either – the models are so high-poly that my slicer can’t even load (much less slice) it. I’ve had a go at extruding the model into a solid object, and unfortunately it’s clear that this isn’t quite the right tool for the job, and I’ll need to find a good chunk of time to spend on the 3D model if I want to test this on a 3D print. I did, however, discover that the model also still has it’s texture, and wonder if I can do that to help make the colors of the walls or windows pop a bit.
