Introduction to Niagara
summary
Niagara is Unreal Engine’s next‑gen VFX toolset for particles and general VFX, presented as a node/module system that mirrors Cascade but makes Emitters reusable and editable; it uses componentized Emitters and separate Emitter spawn and particle update stages, with renderer types (Sprite, Mesh, Ribbon, Light). The demo builds a simple smoke effect and a sprite “duck” emitter, shows spawn rate, lifetime, uniform ranges for velocity, ordering needs like solve forces and velocity before gravity, dynamic material warping, and system‑level shared parameters exposable to Blueprints.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Start
- 4:27open up the actual niagara emitter
- 6:33create the base types of particle
- 7:54spawning through as a sphere
- 10:04copy existing ones from your project
- 12:46build your own version of the emitter life cycle
- 16:48clamp that variable down to a single float value
- 18:10add a little bit of gravity
- 19:19create a niagara
- 22:07setting a target rotation rate
- 22:27pick a random rotation rate every single frame
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