Fade out ribbon effect

Hey, I’m trying to make a ribbon fade in and out when a user holds a button, or have it automatically turn on and off after a player picks something up (think a missile that stops emitting its trail, or the boost ribbons in Rocket League).

The problem I’m having is creating an instance parameter and adjusting the colour changes the entire trail all at once (if I were to try and fade the alpha in/out), I also tried scaling the emitter up and down but same thing - the entire ribbon trail’s width scales up and down, not just the start and end points.

Is this possible to do in blueprints at all?

Thanks.

Hello Rumble,

Not sure if this helps, but if you enable “Kill on completed” in the “Required” node for your ribbon in cascade it should stop the ribbon from spawning if you “disable” it in your blueprint.
That way the last trail particles will die/fade out.

(be sure the material has a “Particle color” node, and its “Alpha” multiplied with whatever goes into your opacity, that way a color over life’s Alpha control will make sure it fades out)

Hey pardon the late reply, I went into asset creation mode for a while there. I’m back at looking at this and right now it seems my problems are that I’m using a pawn. Character BP works fine.

Thanks for the info though, it didn’t seem to help me out in this case… again, I’m guessing it’s because it’s not a character class.