Rust Ribbon
Demo
When I play APEX, dash and momentum are very important concepts. I really love Octane's Stim Needle, which consumes health to increase movement speed. I hope to design a cool visual effect for this ability from a third-person perspective.
In Apex, there are many characters with a mechanical aesthetic. I wish to create a steampunk mechanical skin and skill effect set for Octane. The concepts of 'mechanical' and 'life consumption' remind me of rust, so I decided to use Unreal Niagara to design a Ribbon Particle System that follows player movement. It has a texture reminiscent of rust, appearing like the dynamic afterimages and sand dust as it moves.
Stars Spawned on the Skeletal Mesh
As you could see, the VFX of Stim Needle has a stretched halo(like ribbon) around the screen and some particles floating within it. Inspired by these effects, this Niagara System features an Emitter with three different functionalities: generating particles on a skeletal mesh, Ribbon particles, and body illumination particles.
To create a star-shaped particle, I stretched the size of each particle and used the Binding Parameter to set up a duplicate that's rotated by 90 degrees, subsequently layering them together. Later on, Niagara's 'Sample Skeletal Mesh' allowed these particles to spawn on the character model.
To produce Ribbons trailing the character's limbs during motion, enhancing the sensation of movement, I utilized the Ribbon Renderer to render the particles. On the character's Skeletal Mesh, I added Sockets to the wrists and ankles. These sockets come with an ID, an integer value that pairs with the Ribbon ID, consequently generating the corresponding Ribbon particles.
These emitters tap into the Socket's coordinates, producing static luminescent particles(with light renderer) that light up the wrists and ankles. In a similar vein, an additional one was placed on the chest.
