Let's Build an Unreal Engine 5 Niagara System & Movie (Part 1) - Scene Setup Tutorial
In part 1 of 3 of my Unreal Engine 5 tutorial, I show you how to setup a Niagara system and a foggy scene.
Topics:
Niagara Particle System, mesh particles, forces, curves, etc.
Exponential height fog, volumetric fog, etc.
Directional light, point light
IMPORTANT: You should deactivate static lighting for this project. Static light is not needed and produces an unwanted "glowing" exponential height fog here.
To deactivate Static Lighting, just follow these steps:
(1) on the top right in UE5, go to "Settings" and then to "Project Settings".
(2) in the search field, search for "static light"
(3) deactivate the option "Allow Static Lighting", then close the project settings.
(4) Click on the restart-prompt to restart the project.
P.S.: The aforementioned unwanted "glowing" Exp. Height Fog effect can also be adjusted by changing the option "Static Lighting Scattering Intensity" to "0.0" in the Exp. Height Fog settings.
Overview of all three parts of my UE5 tutorial:
(Part 1) Starting with an empty scene we create niagara systems and a foggy scene. (this video.)
(Part 2) Then setup a camera and setup a level sequence. (see • Let's Build an Unreal Engine 5 Niagara Sys... )
(Part 3) Finally we use movie render queue and FFmpeg to end up with a high quality mp4-file. ( • Let's Build an Unreal Engine 5 Niagara Sys... )
Content
00:00 Intro
00:32 Create a new project
01:05 Create a new particle system
13:19 Recap - particle system
13:42 Create scene - insert light and particles
16:20 Create scene - fog setup
17:08 Create scene - point light setup
19:30 Create scene - color/ light setup
24:13 Create scene - more fog setup and tweaking
28:11 Add floating particles as a cherry on top
33:47 Recap and outro
Shout-out: A few months ago, when I started to learn Unreal Engine, I was inspired by • Let's build this Unreal Niagara particle s... (Sem Schreuder), who created a somehow similar scene. I haven't watched his video since. I think the main similarities are the use of a central point light, mesh particles, fog and a simple curl noise. I created my tutorial independently from his.
I hope my tutorial was helpful and enjoyable for you, regardless of my dialect and wording in need of improvement ;). Cheers!