Particles are not visible when recording movies with Matinee

Hi,
I want to record a movie sequence with Matinee. In my scene I am using some particle emitters from the Particle Effects Demo. Everything is fine. But when I start the Matinee recording the particles are not visible. I do not understand this. What can I do to solve the problem?

Best regards, Andreas

Hi Andreas -

Can you let me know which effects specifically you are using that are not rendering in the Matinee and are if they are rendering in the Viewport?

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

Hi Eric,
thank you for your answer. I use P_Blizzard and P_SnowFlare in the scene. I attached also 2 P_Steam_Lit emitters from the Starter Content. As I removed the P_Steam_Lit emitters everything was ok. It seems that these emitters have caused the problem. Are there a few things to pay attention when using multiple particle systems?

Best regards, Andreas

Hi Maxwell_77 -

Fixed Bounds and if the emitter is translucent or additive (most are) then you will need to be concerned with the placement in relation to the sort order of the camera. This sort order is determined by the fixed bounds of the emitter and the bounds closest to the camera will always draw on top until its bounds are not on top anymore.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

Hi Eric,
thank you very much for this information.

Best regards, Andreas

Hello,

I am experiencing the same issue with a particle from the Effects cave called P_mist_lit_blowing. It renders in the editor and also from matinee through the correct camera in editor, but does not render when creating a movie in matinee. I read your comment about the fixed bounds, but I don’t actually know what to do. Are you saying that the bounds of the mist particle need to be closer to the camera? What is the sort order of the camera? Does the particle’s translucency sort priority change anything? I can have only this particle present and it still doesn’t render in a movie. I think I am missing something.

Hi mjay85 -

Okay so a couple of things to check. Is the Emitter in the level set to auto activate? If not, have you activated it via a Matinee Event or via a Level Blueprint command that does not require player input (like Event Begin Play)?

For the Bounds, you can visualize the particle system’s bounding box & sphere by checking true in the Show >> Advanced >> Bounds menu of the Level Viewport. As long as your camera has a portion of that box within the camera view then the particle system will render. If not, then you can go into Cascade and increase the Fixed Bounds of the system directly by changing the Min and Max Bounds settings.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

Hi mjay85 -

I had a chance to look at that particle system closer and it looks like the system’s last LOD is set to Spawn 0 sprites allowing for a fade out of the system. The Distance can be short depending on your usage, so you can adjust the LOD Distance to allow you to stay in the Spawn particle system longer.

Eric Ketchum

Oh wow, this is great, thank you for the detailed response Eric. When I get home after work tonight I will play around and see if I can get this working. I will update you if I get it working. Thanks again!

I landed here because I had the same problem (with a custom emitter). Tried everything I could think of, then eventually discovered it was just me. The particles were visible in the viewport simply because they were highlighted. They failed to appear in the movie because they were just too small to be visible. I increased the size of the particles and all was well.