The Niagara architecture
As we saw in Chapter 1, the Cascade particle system started to show its age as the demands of the different industries using Unreal began to grow. Niagara was created to meet these demands while at the same time being powerful and easy to use.
Niagara manages to do this by incorporating the following features in its design architecture:
- All data is exposed to the user. Niagara can use data from any part of Unreal Engine as well as from other applications. This lets the user create interesting relationships between the particle system and other aspects of the game.
- Exposing all data can be overwhelming for the user. To make it easy for the user to work with the data, this data is classified hierarchically. This is done by using namespaces.
Figure 3.1: Parameters under the PARTICLES namespace
For example, in Figure 3.1, the PARTICLES namespace carries all the particle attributes, while in Figure 3.2, the EMITTER...
