How to make colored contrail particle effect?

Development Asset Creation
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1

Hello Unreal Community.

I am a very new user to the Unreal Engine and for my first game I wanted to imitate the particle effect shown in the first png image(the bright colored contrails that follow the feet of the characters). After watching the youtube videos on unreal’s particle effects The closest I got was making a GPU sprites emitter that used the same material in the respective tutorial video. All I changed was to drastically increase the span rate and set initial velocity and constant acceleration to zero across the board. I couldn’t alter the ribbon effects in the tutorials to work the way in the png image and I think the beam effect shouldn’t be applied here. It works in the sense that the particles follow my feet during flight but it seems very visually off(I can often see the spheres of each particles instead of them completely blending into a trail) as shown in the jpg image. Also since I feel that I am using way more particles then necessary in order for the trail to be visible at high speeds.

Does anyone know of a better solution? Should I be changing the material of the particles? using a different particle system? or doing some different approach entirely?

PS: +1 for those who know the reference for the first png image.

46405-unreal+4+contrail+particle+effect.jpg
46405-unreal+4+contrail+particle+effect.jpg1552×842 202 KB

2

Ribbon emitter is the way to go for this one. Make sure you use a spawn rate module instead of just spawn so that they are created as the character moves. Ribbon particles can be tricky until you get the right values so you’ll need to try different sets of values.

3

After playing around with the ribbon effect for a few hours I finally got it to work. It seems I was stuck think that you had to use another particle to lead the ribbon as was done in the tutorials instead of just leaving the ribbon emitter by itself. However I am still having issues trying to create the secondary effects of the trail like how sharp turn give the trail “split ends” and the occasional small sparkles at the end of the trail’s edges. I want to make it only appear from the “surface” of the ribbon to reduce memory usage. How would I go about doing this?