Advanced Niagara Effects | Inside Unreal

This week we’ll learn how to recreate several advanced effects from the Unreal Engine 5 demo. We’ll walk you through the techniques and design theories behind the bats, insect swarms, and our recent position-based dynamics-driven popcorn sim: “The Kernel.“ This deep dive will cover spatial hashes, boid simulators, constraints, procedural generation of structural support systems, and more! DISCUSSION **TIMESTAMPS** 00:00 Intro 01:25 Advanced Niagara Effects Reel 04:23 World Interaction 04:31 Niagara World Interfaces 07:39 Distance Field Analysis 10:52 Debug Visualizations 13:08 Implementation 13:48 Flocks 14:18 Flocks Overview 15:40 Avoid Distance Fields Surfaces 18:14 Spatial Hash 20:23 Vision 24:18 Flight Orientation 26:07 Vertex Animation Textures 27:19 Swarms Overview 27:43 Distance Fields Traversal 29:24 Static Mesh Skeletal Animation 32:14 State Machine 34:00 PBD 34:22 Continuous Collision Detection 35:14 Position Based Dynamics 40:04 Recreating Volumes 42:45 Hierarchy 45:32 Constraints 48:57 Swept Intersections 51:53 Safe Particle Distribution 53:50 Q&A 01:32:10 Information & Outro TRANSCRIPT