ANI 210 particle effects in unreal 4
This is a tutorial on how to create a particle effect in Unreal engine 4. With particle effects you can create air born particles such as, snow, rain or fire. For this tutorial I will be making slow falling particles from the sky.


To begin right click in the content browser and select “particle systems”. A particle system will appear in the con tent browser. Once it appears double click it.

When you double click it a new screen will appear showing the default particle emitter. The screen in the top left is the view port showing you the particles spawning and how they are acting. The screen in the bottom left show the details of you particle emitter. The top right shows the emitters that tell you how your particles are emitting and acting and the bottom right shows the curve editor.

To begin right click the black empty space emitters and click “typedata” and then click “New GPU spirtes” this will allow the particles to render on the GPU

next click on the spawn tab under emitters then under details the selection will change to spawn. underneath the spawn tab there is rate and under rate the is distribution and under distribution there is constant. The constant is the number of particles emitted type whatever number of particles you want i personally like 10000 particles.

next step click on lifetime and again the details window should change. Under the lifetime tab on the details window you should find distribution again and under that you should find a minimum and maximum value this is how long the particles will last. Again it is up to you what numbers you put in but make sure the max is equal or higher than the min. After you do this you can zoom out on the view port to see what you particles look like.

Next move on to Initial size to edit the size of your particle similar to editing the lifetime it is found under size, start size then distribution. to change the size simply edit the max and min values making the max equal or higher than the min.

Now to change the velocity of your particles once you click on initial velocity in the details window under velocity, start velocity then distribution you will find a max and a min value. changing the max values will emit particles along there respected axis a compass of these axis can be found on the bottom left hand corner of the view port. Changing the min values will do the exact same thing as the max values so on the min values use minus numbers to counteract the max values. You can also change the direction of your particles using these values but it may require a bit of experimentation. For example i was able to sprey my particles downwards by having the X and Y values opposing and the Z values with the max at -100 and the min at -50


Next right click in the blank space under all the emitters. Then in details under location, start location then distribution you will find max and min values. Changing these values will increase the size of the spawning location. It is up to you what size you want your spawn location to be but to get a nice even square have the max value at a positive number and the min value as the same number but negative. the Z value will increase the height of the spawn location so its up to you whether you change it.

The last thing you need to do is go to the bounds button at the top click the arrow down and click set fixed bounds.

you can now put it into your scene.