I’ve wanted to play with Niagara for a while but I didn’t like the YouTube resources I’d found for it, so I went ahead and tried to follow this course to learn the basics of how they work. Here is my result following along:
It’s another good course. I think Niagara itself is still undergoing changes so sometimes the UI on the video doesn’t match the latest UE4 release, but it’s close enough so it’s still not too difficult to follow. Actually the most difficult sections I found were when trying to make some of the textures in Photoshop. Even with my new trusty graphics tablet I just couldn’t make textures I was happy with, so I ended up just downloading and using the same ones he made.
I haven’t actually finished the course yet, it’s taken me a suprisingly long time to get this far whilst following along. I don’t think I’ll see as much benefit doing the same for the projectiles part of the course, so I’m planning to just watch those chapters without trying to recreate them.
I started this course on Linux but unfortunately UE4 doesn’t feel great in Linux and had a few UI bugs. Mostly they were just annoying but not huge problems in themselves, such as tooltips jittering around and some flickering rendering the viewport. Unfortunately though the popups like this one below turned out to be unclickable for me and that was a much bigger problem!
So in the end it was back to Windows, which is probably where I’ll be forced to stay for any Unreal work for the foreseeable future.
