Freeze / slowing down particles untill they completely stop?

Considering it is all going to be in a single blueprint, you can set custom time dilation for that BP after all the necessary events occur and then freeze it by setting time dilation to 0.

Hi everyone, first post (of many I’m sure)!

Okay so basically what I’m trying to achieve is a holographic star map that ‘explodes’ open. I would ideally like the explosion to be very fast but then rapidly slow down just before it reaches its desired size (or time) and then for all the particles to completely stop moving.

While I am very new to Unreal 4 I have been trying to achieve this for hooours now with no luck. I have tried using an accelerate node to counter the explosion particle velocity but as the particles are traveling in different directions the accelerate doesn’t counter all of them (it actually speeds most of them up). I have also considered using a spherical mesh in order to give something for the particles to collide and stick to but this would make them far to uniform (this is meant to resemble the map of a universe not a uniform sphere of lights).

I have googled for a solution all night and the only idea out there is to use something called slomo which slows down time for everyone except the player pawn. While this sounds perfect, it would effect everything else in my level and be far to obvious that the game had slowed down and not just the particles. Is there a way to do this to only the particle effect and not the rest of the game?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I can provide screenshots (or even video) if needed.

Thank you!

EDIT: Why isn’t there a max particle velocity node? That would solve everything :cries:

Use the Velocity/Life module after your initial velocity module. Just set the Vel Over Life property to a curve and animate it from 1 to 0. This will scale the initial velocity down to 0 at some point in their life.

This approach wouldn’t work on infinite lifetime particles sadly.

Thank you both very much. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use the Velocity/Life module due to using particles with infinite lifetime (no wonder that module didn’t seem to do anything). The custom time dilation worked a treat though!!

I think I’ve fallen in love with Unreal… it’s 5am. Whoops!

Thanks again.

Also try the particle module Acceleration>Drag which continuously degrades the velocity of each particle.

Thanks :smiley: this was useful for an ingame screenshot