How to get particles to be influenced by a character?

I remember an Epic video from awhile back where they showed a character running through GPU particle systems and they reacted to it in real time. Needless to say, that was incredible looking and I am wondering how to go about reproducing that in my game. Would it be as simple as strapping a global vector field onto him?

You could try and use a Vector field attached to your character, or you could try and use the DepthCollsion module and offset the collision from the surface of your character with the Radius Bias setting.

Set your Resilience to a low value, and set your friction to a low value so the sprites slide across your characters surface, then offset them and drive them way from your characeters X/Y/Z orientation with velocity/acceleration.

In either case you will need to use GPU particles.

Great stuff, thank you homeRye.

One other method I thought of, you could use an instance parameter and an attractor. Use a blueprint to get the world location of your pawn, or specify a socket location on your pawn, and then set the attractors location to the pawns world location.

The attractor needs to have negative strength values, a reasonable range, and set to world space position.