June 2023 Update: Best UE5/Niagara Tutorial On the Web

Another month of game dev come and gone. It was quite a month at and away from the workstation, so I'll get right into it and keep it brief overall.

The goal this week was to develop the basic look and workflow for creating the "memories" the player unlocks to progress the story. This involves two major areas of UE5 that are new to me -- the animation system, and Niagara/FX (as the "characters" in this game are meant to present as holograms, of a sort).

This is a bit like saying "this month all I need to do is learn physics and ballroom dance."

I've made headway on figuring out how to use both systems, but there's still plenty of work left to do before I can get a new build out there with the fruits of this labor. I've re-worked the dev schedule for the rest of 2023 to give myself another crack at it in July, and still have a "vertical slice" type protoype of the game's basic gameplay by the end of the year. By the way, that's a goal of mine. I don't think I've mentioned that in one of these devlogs before. Yay?

Last thing I'll leave you with for this month, which hopefully someone out there finds helpful: the best training resource on Niagara I've found for FX beginners anywhere on the Internet:

https://www.udemy.com/course/unreal-engine-5-one-course-solution-for-niagara-vfx...

I have no experience with any game engine other than Unreal. I got into it as a complete novice after UE4 went open source, and since then 90% of what I know has been learned from a wealth of free material found either through Epic Games' online resources, or YouTube. You can literally get going from nothing with a little Google-fu, it's insane.

Except VFX. Womp.

I spent the first two weeks of June trying to learn Niagara via YouTube and Epic's developer portal, and it was honestly a disaster. There are a bunch of talented content creators out there creating tutorial material, but nearly all of it suffers from at least one of these two critical issues --

1. Niagara has undergone significant design/development changes in the few years since it was made publicly available, which has made any tutorial online older than ~1 year (and/or based on < UE 5.1) so stale as to be incomprehensible to a beginner. Someone more experienced could sort of Rosetta Stone their way into understanding, but...if they are already that proficient, they're likely not the audience for most of these videos. The comment threads on a lot of these threads are replete with drowning beginners. None of this is anyone's fault, per se, but it a) doesn't change the fact that it limits the usefulness of these tutorials, and b) might indicate that Niagara training is sort of suffering from a YouTube algorithm problem -- i.e., content creators went nuts trying to be the first to create training material for Niagara when it first hit the scene in early access trying to ride hype waves and developer interest, and now that it's stable and a few years on many are chasing other trends.
2. A lot of the training material out there appears to be geared to VFX artists who are new to Niagara, not users who are new to VFX. This felt especially true to me for any material I found either from or via Epic itself. If you need to learn Niagara the tool, but also simultaneously need to be taught the general practice and theory of CG VFX (like me), those two circles don't overlap online nearly as much as you might think they do.

Enter Vince Petrelli's Udemy course, linked above. His instruction is clear, thoughtfully laid out, and assumes you know nothing about how to create a digital effect, let alone in Niagara. Heck, it assumes you know precious little about CG in general (though you do need to be generally comfortable in the engine; this is not a good "first time booting up Unreal" course). It's also based on UE 5.1, which is more than modern enough for teaching Niagara, as the system seems pretty stable at this point from a design standpoint. I've literally not found anything comparable to this course, and if the topic interests you Mr. Petrelli deserves your money.

And, hey, there's still room for tons more high-quality training material out there. If you're a VFX artist looking for a side hustle (who isn't, in this economy), start teaching us plebs Niagara and real-time VFX online!

Love you, mean it,

-Tyler