Triffids Project: Constrained Niagara particles

Triffids was an idea I played with for a while where you control and grow a sentient alien-like plant. Each particle could act as a “bud” to spawn off a particular type of flower or growth to defend the plant or attract things to it. It was going to be some sort of puzzle/escape room RTS mash up….with physics.

It was also a technical experiment focused on per-particle constraints and self collisions using Unreal’s Niagara particle system. I also had to work out a way to track the particle hierarchy so each particle would know things about its parent particle. This was just before Niagara data channels became a thing, and I had to work out a bunch of things to allow for player input and also dynamic length chains of particles.

I still like the game idea, but I don’t think I would try and do it with Niagara again.

Huge shout out to Ghislain Girardot and his absolutely incredible tech art experiments and tutorial videos for the inspiration. The man is a wizard.

Particles spawned by the player, constraining themselves to their parent, colliding with the world etc. The camera could be updated to focus on certain particles, the constraint lengths could be shrunk a bit to create tension in the chain, and the particles could kind of self collide.

This rebuilt version supported differing, and dynamic particle sizes which was actually quite a tricky complication.

Early tests of player input feeding into the particle system