Week 5

Oct 7, 2024 - Oct 13, 2024

Thankfully, mentor David left feedback on my FX last week:

"For the meteors, since they're so far away, you could try generating a nice looking hero meteor with a trail at the origin and use it as a texture on particles. (sprite / ribbon?) Just render a longer sequence so you can time offset the texture sequence per particle to make them feel unique."

I also thought the meteors looked pretty boring and flat in terms of their visuals, so I attempted to make it more interesting without taking attention away from the planet.

Reference

Approach

As the new reference is also quite simple but has a more interesting visual, I changed the ribbon renderer to a sprite renderer. Now they have a stardust while falling. I could change the colors of them as well, but I just left them in a yellow-ish white color to maintain a little bit of realistic visual.

In addition, I separated asteroid FX by the nut types to see if that works better since it will have less to process per system. All I changed for a better performance are collision radius size and spawn count. I adjusted the values of vortex force and shape location size for visual purposes. and It doesn't have a big difference performance-wise compared to the previous one, but it got a little faster in terms of changing the values in parameters. While looking for a solution for the collision, I found out that collision is one of the most expensive aspects of the Niagara system especially when using CPU instead of GPU. That being said, the asteroid FX got multiple collisions inside of one Niagara system, so it is not surprising anymore that the performance got slower. I couldn't decide which version of Asteroid FX would work better in our scene because I haven't played with collisions a lot with a new one. I need to look for more about collisions between Niagara systems.

For the rest of the weeks, I want to experiment more with collisions, however, I'll be most likely to use the one I created previously. Separated ones are a little faster but it is just a subtle change and I don't think there is a way to set collision between Niagara systems. All the collision settings are about collisions between the Niagara system and the objects in the scene and the Niagara system doesn't seem like it is considered an object. What I can try though is I have a grid that detects the meshes that are inside of the grid in the Niagara system so I will reduce the grid cell size and the neighbors per cell so that it can calculate less amount of collisions between meshes.

It really is hard to troubleshoot the collision issue, but it is a lot of fun to try and get to know more about the Niagara system! :)

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