[Niagara 5.1] Plexus Mini Tutorial

finish end result

So, I need to attempt to present a form of minimal setup for doing plexus/community tech-y kinda results in Niagara. Similar to the opposite mini tutorials, this isn’t supposed to be a complete one cease store, however as an alternative the smallest potential implementation, a floor stage introduction you could begin build up from.

Solely actual prerequisite is to have fundamental Niagara information. None of this can make sense should you don’t. There’s tones of excellent intro-into-niagara video’s on the market, come again when you’ve had a glance by these.

Supply
The supply would be the set of particles to span the plexus between, with our setup, this could possibly be pretty arbitrary, on this case I went for a easy particle burst with excessive drag, and vortex/curl drive pulling on the particles close to the tip of their dwell so as to add some movement.

Getting the nodes
As soon as we now have a bunch of supply particles, we’ll need to outline connections, on this model we’re going for a 1 particle per connection system, so we’ll want 2 nodes to go between.
To that finish, on particle spawn we are going to search for 2 guardian particles, and save their id’s for use for lookup.

We save the thought as an alternative of the index, as a result of the buffer can be shuffled and we’d like a constant approach to lookup the identical 2 particles.

Observe : Bear in mind to allow persistent id era on the Supply Emitter!

We can’t get 2 random id’s although since they’re considerably unpredictable of their development. So as an alternative we get 2 random indices, and lookup and save their id’s as an alternative.
You may attempt to clear up equivalent dad and mom right here as effectively, however I favor to simply kill the connection in that case.

Updating the connections
Now that we now have 2 factors to attach between, we solely want to search out them and put a line between them.
Really, placing a line between 2 factors is already supported by the module SpriteBaseLine out of the field, so let’s simply use that.
Observe : SpriteBasedLine requires altering the Place, SpriteSize and Alignment Bindings.
Observe : You additionally have to set the sprite Alignment mode to customized

To get the factors themselves we will use the particle attribute reader once more.
Much like how our particle location module works, we’ll learn the areas, test their validity and set some positions and the DataInstance.Alive parameter.
We save the positions into 2 output parameters Pos1 and Pos2 on this case so we will simply discover them again within the SpriteBasedLine module.

We additionally calculate a energy parameter primarily based on the space between the two dad and mom. That is to facility clean fading because the particle transfer additional aside. (I suppose this isn’t strictly minimal, but it surely’s fairly widespread performance in these kind of results)

An invalid guardian will trigger the connection to interrupt. If we don’t do that, the connection will snap again to the middle of the world.

And that’s it, shouldn’t be tremendous troublesome, however might be actually highly effective in the best context.
Hopefully that’s useful

Extra

I wished so as to add just a few extra strategies to get the gears turning.

• These are sprites, so you possibly can add some fascinating shapes like lightning and many others…
• Verify Size earlier than spawning to take out connections which are too lengthy or too quick.
• Partition utilizing neighbor grid and discover the closest n neighboring particles to create a cleaner non-overlapping community.