@Dindu Τhat is true, but there are ways to implement AI in particle systems. Maybe for specific units like spiders lets say, that have less complex movement/battle set. I agree though 1,000,000 units is definitely overkill, that will be your whole game :D haha! But I think with a good development team, you can pull off maybe 100.000 units on screen... Especially with UE5 and Nanite technology. TWWH2 already does 50k : th-cam.com/video/iuQwWfmrjbE/w-d-xo.html Personally I prefer the BFME style of gameplay, it's more flexible. Especially for something like Lord of the Rings where you have to follow heroes around and there aren't so many big battles, excluding Helm's Deep and Pelennor Fields.
@Dindu Oh I see, didn't realize it was a different game mode :D.. Well I'm not sure if it's something to do with the game's source code or bad optimization, but historically you needed a lot of RAM to run this game with many units. About the other thing you asked, I just meant that those are the biggest battles in LOTR, where you would see the most player & enemy units at the same time... :D
it was an amazing presentation if you are a programmer and you are advanced. I want to do this so bad but this was of little use. im not a programmer. Im a film maker. and there are no tutorials on this for people like me.Really sucks!
@@MCJams I am a film maker and a programmer. Whenever I want to learn something I dive in and learn it, even if it may seem challenging. I've done a lot of things that at one point I didn't believe I would be able to do, just because I pushed myself to learn them. I say just go for it! You never know how far you can go unless you try.
8:13 i noticed that in games a long time ago, the guy close to me was legit but the ones in the back where like ...t posing or something just floating around, like a 2d painted character lol. And if he got a bit closer i could see him snap into the 3d model :))
Hi! If anyone's getting blocked at recreating the play anim NFS and cant get the animation to loop properly, check that your MAP GET and MAP SET are actually particle attributes. ( And try creating it directly from the Particle Attributes panel instead of the way show in the video.. ) 🙂
Hi, I am indeed blocked at this step. How do I find the "Not Equal", "Multiply", "Add" nodes etc.? The correct nodes don't show up when I search for them, otherwise they won't allow me to hook up to the "Animation State" InputMap node. I'm so confused and would love any advice on this. Thanks!
Any chance of a sample project coming out? I would love to poke through it and it's incredibly frustrating to understand from the brief snippets shown in this video.
Obviously, this is a presentation for advanced users, most of what was described here I had yet to learn how to do or what it meant. I'd have to individually check each suggestion or terminology.
Am I the only one who realized that he is making a tutorial using a function that is not in the engine...? How about showing how he made that function... Or most people here are just watching g and not doing
I think I now get how they managed to pull off the crazy amounts of rats spawned and moving around in A Plague Tale: Innocence. I am assuming its similar in some regards. Super cool video, thanks!
Wow this stuff would have been amazing on a previous project... it was on unreal 4.15. Seems so easy to get good result and good performance. Awesome tutorial.
How are the differences between this Niagara solution for large crowds compared to the new MassEntity/MassAI Crowd? Number of Characters? Complexity of animations and AI logic?
If you cant see the function in scratch pad, make sure to set the script library visibility of NFS_Play_Animation to Exposed. For some reason you also cant drag drop NFS into Scratch
I love this and i can get quite allot to work. But he skims over the blueprint part of the niagara system. Some elements i can understand like the particle Object reference and blueprint interaction. But could someone explain f.e. how he shoots a bullet and when it hits the niagara system, the niagara system tracks the bullet location and makes that niagara particle interact towards the player or how when the blast location is sent to the particle system that those specific particles are removed and replaced by flying meshes/particles?
@@SahilP2648 if im being honest, i want a triple A game on the scale of elder scrolls/dragon dogma with more npcs on screen. Tired of playing rpgs with barely any NPCS to populate the world without the help of mods.
Is there a way to do pathfinding with niagara? Alternative tell a particle to follow a path with vectors I pushed to them by blueprint? I want to tell the particle move to location on this path. It has to be a path because of collission. I know there is collsion handling in niagara but when the move into a corner they are stucked there and can´t find a way out.
Very interesting topic. The limitations on actor count per scene have always been one of my main problems with unreal. Especially gamethread related bottlenecks. I'm not really that familiar with niagara tho, so for me it's kinda hard to now understand what's possible with this strategy and what isn't (l mean with still good performance). Obviously the complexity of each individual unit here is rather low compared to strapping a whole AI tree on a character, but I suppose you could just do alot with additional code. But when you run that code you would probably lose a lot of the performance gain again. Still it looks like you were able to add a lot of functionality for what seems like almost no gamethread performance loss. So why exactly (on a technical level) is this niagara strategy better for large crowds, how does it scale so good? The instructions for each unit (like the position depending on the unit in front of it) should still be per unit (=> linear scaling) no? And there is still collision running, as we could see when u shot them. Why are actors performing so incredibly bad and this so incredibly good on the engine level? I fail to see where all the overhead on actors went, since they still scale so bad even if you deactivate a ton of their features like movement components, etc.
There is no collision, Niagaras collision is too unreliable to be used for game purposes. The example used tricks to make it work in a small scale, but it's not usable for actual gameplay. The reason the performance is so good because they are basically particles / instanced meshes with vertex animations. But you can't change the vertex animations during runtime, like using a different animation for an attack, so it's only good for "static" scenes.
@@GordonSeal You can change the animations during runtime actually. You just add an attack animation to your same texture and have a frame parameter in the material which can talk to Niagara.
The comment i found on reddit: - "Nanite seems to be precomputed mesh reduction. Most mesh reduction algorithms repeatedly combine a few triangles at a time to generate a LOD. This takes a lot of compute effort to pick the next place to reduce detail. But suppose, instead of combining them, you kept track of which ones you'd combine and stored that with the mesh. Then, at display time, you remove unwanted detail using the precomputed info to tell you which triangles to combine. That, I think, is what Nanite is doing."
Hi, I am blocked at this step at 12:30. How do I find the "Not Equal", "Multiply", "Add" nodes etc.? The correct nodes don't show up when I search for them, otherwise they won't allow me to hook up to the "Animation State" InputMap node. I'm so confused and would love any advice on this. Thanks!
tried it twice now with the example teacup and also with another mesh but seems like i cannot get the texture to animation process right :(. They always look weird and do not really animate
The true challenge lies in allowing a large amount of (human) players on a single map. Such as Fortnite, PUBG or other large maps with a hundred or more players. Is a BR game able to allow 200, 500, 1000 or 10 000 players on one map? This might be possible in the near future.
This is possible with server side object container streaming, something Star Citizen (if it ever fully releases) is doing, and fundamentally many of the popular MMO's have been doing this for many years to an extent. Technically you can have 10,000 players on a huge map that is spread throughout multiple servers and only connect the player the nearest couple of servers around the player, then use a texture and object streaming system for client side data like how any open world game works.
Thank you very good tutorial and details, well i has one question if you can reply. How many maximum megaoctet, the model mesh for actor niagara, render mesh particles? Because , i need information for to manage my project. Thank you again, i hope you give your reply
Can i ask vertex animation how to export ani-composit and how to make in 3D Max? I can find document about animatinn import to 3D Max and how to vertexing
One of the best presentations seen from Unreal Engine tbh
A download would be great because I know how creative the community can be!
Download please :)
Epic as usual is ahead of the game
Nice to see some methods of debugging and optimizing demonstrated!
Is your sample project available to download anywhere? Would be really awesome to pull it apart and play around with it
^ This
agree - I want to see how you built it.
yeah, that would be great!
Why not no download?
This project exists, why no download link?
"The player wont even notice"
Cyberpunk: 👁👄👁
An in-engine vertex animation tool would be awesome! For users like me that doesn't use other 3D content creation tools this could be really handy.
If there was ever a good time to make a new Lord of the Rings RTS... ;)
Or Total War. 😍😍😍
😀
Or an actual good game of Starship Troopers
@Dindu Τhat is true, but there are ways to implement AI in particle systems. Maybe for specific units like spiders lets say, that have less complex movement/battle set.
I agree though 1,000,000 units is definitely overkill, that will be your whole game :D haha!
But I think with a good development team, you can pull off maybe 100.000 units on screen... Especially with UE5 and Nanite technology.
TWWH2 already does 50k : th-cam.com/video/iuQwWfmrjbE/w-d-xo.html
Personally I prefer the BFME style of gameplay, it's more flexible. Especially for something like Lord of the Rings where you have to follow heroes around and there aren't so many big battles, excluding Helm's Deep and Pelennor Fields.
@Dindu Oh I see, didn't realize it was a different game mode :D.. Well I'm not sure if it's something to do with the game's source code or bad optimization, but historically you needed a lot of RAM to run this game with many units.
About the other thing you asked, I just meant that those are the biggest battles in LOTR, where you would see the most player & enemy units at the same time... :D
Yep, this had me flashing back to War of the Ring then BTS of the LotR movies with Weta Workshop showing their MASSIVE tech!
What an amazing presentation. Full of useful, specific, advanced information :) We need more of these!
it was an amazing presentation if you are a programmer and you are advanced. I want to do this so bad but this was of little use. im not a programmer. Im a film maker. and there are no tutorials on this for people like me.Really sucks!
@@MCJams I am a film maker and a programmer. Whenever I want to learn something I dive in and learn it, even if it may seem challenging. I've done a lot of things that at one point I didn't believe I would be able to do, just because I pushed myself to learn them. I say just go for it! You never know how far you can go unless you try.
@@MCJams Its called learning. try it
Great walkthrough, highlight was "1 bird and make sure the bird doesn't die"
is there a more updated version of this tutorial? things have changed a bit and i cannot find the options that you indicate
Great tutorial had to rewatch a few times. Should be remastered for UE5 and added to the launcher sample section for people to follow along!
This gotta be the most fascinating presentation ever.
Yeah but still not enough documentation or explanations to reproduce it... and its 3 years old...
so this a "we did it , but you have to do it yourself" presentation.
Yeah, I'm not sure why they don't give this out to learn from
I don’t understand half the terms he is using but it sounds very interesting.
This is such a great tutorial video. I've rarely touched Niagara, but everything was very easy to follow.
8:13 i noticed that in games a long time ago, the guy close to me was legit but the ones in the back where like ...t posing or something just floating around, like a 2d painted character lol. And if he got a bit closer i could see him snap into the 3d model :))
and to solve this is very EAAASYYY... you only need to make super complex blueprints from scratch.
This is what I’ve been looking for!
what the clone army and stormtroppers were not enough 🤣
@32:10 small correction 1 million times 32 bits = 32MegaBits, = 4 Mega Bytes.
Hi! If anyone's getting blocked at recreating the play anim NFS and cant get the animation to loop properly, check that your MAP GET and MAP SET are actually particle attributes. ( And try creating it directly from the Particle Attributes panel instead of the way show in the video.. ) 🙂
Hi, I am indeed blocked at this step. How do I find the "Not Equal", "Multiply", "Add" nodes etc.? The correct nodes don't show up when I search for them, otherwise they won't allow me to hook up to the "Animation State" InputMap node. I'm so confused and would love any advice on this. Thanks!
Any chance of a sample project coming out? I would love to poke through it and it's incredibly frustrating to understand from the brief snippets shown in this video.
That “future work” would be so nice to see.
Is it possible to download the project somewhere?
Obviously, this is a presentation for advanced users, most of what was described here I had yet to learn how to do or what it meant.
I'd have to individually check each suggestion or terminology.
Cant believe this is free! Amazing!
Am I the only one who realized that he is making a tutorial using a function that is not in the engine...? How about showing how he made that function... Or most people here are just watching g and not doing
I think I now get how they managed to pull off the crazy amounts of rats spawned and moving around in A Plague Tale: Innocence. I am assuming its similar in some regards. Super cool video, thanks!
Is there an updated version of this video or another that talks more about something like this? or some examples we can mess with? This is amazing!
This lets me know I have so much more to learn about Unreal Engine! Wow
Wow this stuff would have been amazing on a previous project... it was on unreal 4.15. Seems so easy to get good result and good performance.
Awesome tutorial.
How are the differences between this Niagara solution for large crowds compared to the new MassEntity/MassAI Crowd?
Number of Characters? Complexity of animations and AI logic?
Just like Quixel, if Unreal can buy Character Creator 3 and make it free, it will be tremendously helpful!
Or you could pay people what they are owed
Thank you for taking the time to create and share!!
Joseph is awesome, thanks for an awesome session!
thanks man!
Hi there - How did you spawn a skeletal mesh with Niagara? PLEASE :)
Thank you for sharing. Nice tut..
Best tutorial ever. But please, please, share the project!
Can we get the project or a small sample project for study?
He said sprites in a scene.
Wow, that was the best Unreal tutorial I've ever seen.
Hats off, kid.
This was epic
I'll probably just use it for scattering insects
If you cant see the function in scratch pad, make sure to set the script library visibility of NFS_Play_Animation to Exposed. For some reason you also cant drag drop NFS into Scratch
I would so buy this project just for studying it!
What a amazing Niagara can do so much ! thank you for this video. also Could you share this example project download for study?
this could make for an amazing star ship troopers game
Yep, this had me flashing back to War of the Ring then BTS of the LotR movies with Weta Workshop showing their MASSIVE tech!
This makes me think we all are just particles with limited AI in a huge simulated universe
who is playing with the engine ? a fortnite kid of the other universe ?
wow nice thinking ,,like cosmos ,,,it will help you in concept art
@@brucewayne2480 We can't know. Just like the characters in unreal will never know
Very nice. Showcase the end result at the end of the video for a clearer picture.
Would love to have the demo available to download, PLEASE!
Hello I am trying to follow what you did in the video and I am stuck at how to export the animation composite
There is a record button next to the play button of the composite
Is this available for download?
I love this and i can get quite allot to work. But he skims over the blueprint part of the niagara system. Some elements i can understand like the particle Object reference and blueprint interaction. But could someone explain f.e. how he shoots a bullet and when it hits the niagara system, the niagara system tracks the bullet location and makes that niagara particle interact towards the player or how when the blast location is sent to the particle system that those specific particles are removed and replaced by flying meshes/particles?
Thank you so much for this.
this is what ive been clamoring for! Massive NPC battles that ain't RTS.
Totally accurate battle simulator
@@SahilP2648 saw it, but not much devs will use that engine.
@@Vaegir808 I Thought you wanted a game since you mentioned RTS. Maybe be more specific henceforth.
@@SahilP2648 if im being honest, i want a triple A game on the scale of elder scrolls/dragon dogma with more npcs on screen. Tired of playing rpgs with barely any NPCS to populate the world without the help of mods.
@@Vaegir808 go play AC Unity. Hundreds of NPCs to your heart's content.
Is there a way to do pathfinding with niagara?
Alternative tell a particle to follow a path with vectors I pushed to them by blueprint?
I want to tell the particle move to location on this path.
It has to be a path because of collission. I know there is collsion handling in niagara but when the move into a corner they are stucked there and can´t find a way out.
Thats impressive! And thanxs for detailed breakdown.
0:15 if only total war had this many
16:13 Wait... you can do arithmetic in input fields?!?
thats how numbers work in all computers, a calculation is treated as a number due to it returning a number
YES
@@mrpaz410 but not every program has this feature. Photoshop allows operations in some value fields but not all for example (which is stupid)
Could this project please be released as demo?
Great presentation! Thanks for the effort!
Very interesting topic.
The limitations on actor count per scene have always been one of my main problems with unreal. Especially gamethread related bottlenecks.
I'm not really that familiar with niagara tho, so for me it's kinda hard to now understand what's possible with this strategy and what isn't (l mean with still good performance).
Obviously the complexity of each individual unit here is rather low compared to strapping a whole AI tree on a character, but I suppose you could just do alot with additional code.
But when you run that code you would probably lose a lot of the performance gain again. Still it looks like you were able to add a lot of functionality for what seems like almost no gamethread performance loss.
So why exactly (on a technical level) is this niagara strategy better for large crowds, how does it scale so good?
The instructions for each unit (like the position depending on the unit in front of it) should still be per unit (=> linear scaling) no?
And there is still collision running, as we could see when u shot them.
Why are actors performing so incredibly bad and this so incredibly good on the engine level? I fail to see where all the overhead on actors went, since they still scale so bad even if you deactivate a ton of their features like movement components, etc.
There is no collision, Niagaras collision is too unreliable to be used for game purposes. The example used tricks to make it work in a small scale, but it's not usable for actual gameplay.
The reason the performance is so good because they are basically particles / instanced meshes with vertex animations.
But you can't change the vertex animations during runtime, like using a different animation for an attack, so it's only good for "static" scenes.
@@GordonSeal You can change the animations during runtime actually. You just add an attack animation to your same texture and have a frame parameter in the material which can talk to Niagara.
Remember that time Weta set up out door tents for computers to increase render power to render massive battle scenes for Lord of the Ring?
Are there any ideas on how would it be possible to use this with Mass framework?
ANyone how he acheived the particle avoidance? Im talking about the demo with the Boy walking through the birds, and the birds moving away from him.
In the animation player module I can't figure out what argument/function is being used beneath the comment that says "Reset Time if State Changed"
Great, but can you make the tutorial for Unreal 5?
In regards to the LODs. In Unreal Engine 5, can you use nanite static meshes with niagara in order to make use of the auto LOD?
The comment i found on reddit: - "Nanite seems to be precomputed mesh reduction. Most mesh reduction algorithms repeatedly combine a few triangles at a time to generate a LOD. This takes a lot of compute effort to pick the next place to reduce detail. But suppose, instead of combining them, you kept track of which ones you'd combine and stored that with the mesh. Then, at display time, you remove unwanted detail using the precomputed info to tell you which triangles to combine.
That, I think, is what Nanite is doing."
It seems like a better way to handle enemy ais. Instead of normal bps. With respect to increased performance
Fantastic video and so well explained!
Hey guys, anyone know why it might be that my Animation Budget Allocator always shows the graph at 0.0? even with 145 characters?
This is the most epic thing ive seen in Unreal...Now im off to quickly go make my own Total War game :p
Thank you, is there a sample project ?
This is amazing.
why can't you leave a sample project link? Why?
Me (a person who hasnt touched particles outside of simple bullets and flames) *sees this video*: Interesting...
in 10 or 20 years, it maybe a 'spawn crowd' button. This looks amazing but really super advanced. The use of billboards was a great idea,
me who's only had a pc for 6 months and only games
Hi, I am blocked at this step at 12:30. How do I find the "Not Equal", "Multiply", "Add" nodes etc.? The correct nodes don't show up when I search for them, otherwise they won't allow me to hook up to the "Animation State" InputMap node. I'm so confused and would love any advice on this. Thanks!
You are a pixels wizard !
TY for this!!!!!!!!
This is awesome, hopefully one day I can become an evangelist
matrix path of neo..got them agent smiths covered!
With all the hype around data oriented design, will this philosophy begin to make it's way into UE4 more?
tried it twice now with the example teacup and also with another mesh but seems like i cannot get the texture to animation process right :(. They always look weird and do not really animate
Simply impressive!
Well this also work with procedural generated actors/blueprints? (procedural spiders for example)
Why not publish a sample project?
what if im spawning multiple bullets at the same time? how can each niagara particle effectively track multiple bullet locations at the same time?
cool, where can I find this sample source code?
Can this handle more objects than Unity's DOTS system? DOTS can handle about 150,000 objects at once above 30 fps.
24:04 Zoom in/out: Press 'Z/C/Shift' key.
The true challenge lies in allowing a large amount of (human) players on a single map. Such as Fortnite, PUBG or other large maps with a hundred or more players. Is a BR game able to allow 200, 500, 1000 or 10 000 players on one map? This might be possible in the near future.
Lineage 2? on the siege? happened more than 1 thousand at the castle)
@@HiDSHOT without any lag?😆
This is possible with server side object container streaming, something Star Citizen (if it ever fully releases) is doing, and fundamentally many of the popular MMO's have been doing this for many years to an extent. Technically you can have 10,000 players on a huge map that is spread throughout multiple servers and only connect the player the nearest couple of servers around the player, then use a texture and object streaming system for client side data like how any open world game works.
Thank you very good tutorial and details, well i has one question if you can reply. How many maximum megaoctet, the model mesh for actor niagara, render mesh particles? Because , i need information for to manage my project. Thank you again, i hope you give your reply
@UnrealEngine what would be super useful (I think!) how can we do this with the metahuman crowd system/meshes, possible?
awesome! where can i give a closer look to all those bird examples? :)
This is crazy good :)
Can i ask vertex animation how to export ani-composit and how to make in 3D Max?
I can find document about animatinn import to 3D Max and how to vertexing
How do you create the play animation in Unreal 4.27? I cant seem to replicate what you created.
Thanks, very good ivdeo
Amazing Amazing Amazing.
omg yes :D
As I have been waiting for this day
Can I make the soldiers stationary without them moving around?
That's great, keep it up!