Fireworks

 So I began my new set of VFX miniatures by what could be seen as a very simple one but as the title of the blog notes, Fireworks. 

To create them i first watched a tutorial i found by Coreb Games, and then closed down the page and went of my memory. Before going into details of the breakdown, ill quickly go over the things that i either learnt from the tutorial or from my memory causing me to have to come up with solutions.

The main thing i learnt from this is the proper application of the "generate event" aspect of the Niagara engine, as for the longest time i struggled, specially with the generate death event, to time things and use effects that could link in the same effect as i would use blueprints to hide effects once i would be done with it but now i can use the generate death even to hide, the generate location so items follow each other.

From memory i was able to initially implement the generate events but i couldn't get them to work, but that's where i spent 10 minutes clicking around and learnt that for the generate events to work its best to have them on system lifetime rather than self as then it should follow the same timings and end at the same time.

Now onto the creation process:

it starts with using the fountain emitter and lowering the spawn rate so that only a handful of particles are spawned, from this the gravity force is deleted as we want the particle to go up wards with as little force against it. Following the removal of the gravity force, a scale sprite size is introduced and flipped so that the particles faded in nothing, along with adding colour if I wanted. finally 3 more tings occurred on this first section. I created the generate location and death events along with increasing the velocity so that it shoots out higher and faster.

Following this is the introduction of the ribbon to create the streaking effect that fireworks give off, i removed the spawn rate as it has to be spawned from a pre-existing particle. I copied across the colour so it matches the initial burst. I needed a Scale ribbon width so that the ribbon can be seen but not to big that it overshadows the particle and finally I had to add an event handler in to link it to the location of the original fountain effect.

Finally a third emitter is needed to create the actual firework explosion. immediately the spawn rate is removed and replaced with an event handler for the death event, within the handler its set so 3000 particles will spawn when the initial particle dies. for the most part everything is kept the same on the emitter as i picked the directional burst with only needing to add a scale sprite so that as the explosion falls, it fades to nothing.

So that's the original tutorial along with my guess work. i recreated it and saw if i could add an extra step to make it even more original by instead of the firework exploding massively on the first explosion have it so small pieces fall from it that lead into a bigger explosion so there are multiple bigger explosions, like some fireworks i remember watching as a child were like.

Overall im happy with what ive made as its hopefully a good starting point to build on.