Unreal 5.1 - Turn any Niagara particle system into metaballs (BEGINNER TUTORIAL)

[@lememaker]

this is perfect for what ive been trying to do. im trying to give my character a stylized flame head, and i found a way in blender with metaballs that looked perfect, but then found that baking the animation in blender caused it to no longer be dynamic. but this fixes all that. Thx!

[@ChrixB]

Beginner Tutorial ?! Wow, that is the most advanced Niagara particle I ever saw, I only understand the fountain emitter haha. I would like to know more about the custom HLSL code, which seems to be very powerful. Thanks for sharing it's really amazing what we can do with Niagara now!

[@EnriqueVenturaGames]

Understanding the fountain is good enough for now! No worries, I'll make a followup to this tutorial where we'll customize some of these functions

[@Zarosian_Ice]

Wow, coming from blender i wanted to do some water particles and got a bit sad i couldn't get it to work till my brain got some wrinkles and remembered about metaballs in blender :D Happy to see they're a thing in ue5 as well (:

[@stefevr]

Thanks so much for taking the time for making this, very to the point and super useful

[@aurelianobuendia24]

Where is the part 2 ? I want to map the age of every particle to the color. Or i want to have it more than one color, im trying but i can seem to get the camara work nice

[@next1291]

Hey i have a question: so the bounding grid volume, is casting some kind of distancefield/occlusion for me. - is there a way to get rid of that effect? :)

[@syno3608]

Thank thank thank you

[@EnriqueVenturaGames]

Thank you too!

[@azamatgasimov2520]

Thanks for the tutorial! Do you think there is a way to attach/lock a static texture to SDF particles? When I assign texture to a material M_WaterSDF, it works like a camera projection. Thanks!

[@PeterFearVFX]

looks great, but still our Niagara fluids optimised enough for gameplay yet. They used to be really heavy, even for simple stuff

[@EnriqueVenturaGames]

Thanks! You're not wrong, I think they are still usable in cinematics and for very specific (and controlled) gameplay effects. For anything heavy I would still recommend baking the effect into a sprite sheet texture.

[@nodelayfordays8083]

@@EnriqueVenturaGames Maybe you can make a video on how to bake fluid sims for use?

[@EnriqueVenturaGames]

@@nodelayfordays8083 Sure! It is a lot easier these days, but I'll make a short video about it! (working on another one ATM, and also pretty busy with work, but I'll get to it soon!)

[@TheFlyingEpergne]

thanks for this (: is there a way to make this work with collisions?

[@EnriqueVenturaGames]

They should work with regular static geo collisions without any extra work. I recently posted a video on how to do inter particle collisions, if that is what you were looking for :)

[@namesurname624]

How performant is this?

[@aresagathos2075]

Why don't you use Custom Scratch Pad Modules, prefering to type the math directly onto the emitter?

[@EnriqueVenturaGames]

I've done scratch pads in other tutorials, and once I come back to metaballs in the future I'll probably do it again. In this one I wanted to keep it more beginner friendly, that is why :)

[@aresagathos2075]

@@EnriqueVenturaGames Looking forward to more amazing and inspiring effects.

[@fizzandfur4237]

For some reason I can't get my fluid to be transparent at all, only opaque :(

[@EnriqueVenturaGames]

Double check the blend mode on the material! :)

[@MadMax-mw3og]

Could these particles use physics collision

[@EnriqueVenturaGames]

They can! Just add a collision module in Niagara (distance fields work best)