Exporting particles to Unreal Engine - how?

Software Support & Suggestions EmberGen
1

Hey there!

I’m working on a project that requires bringing some of our Embergen effects into Unreal 5.5. I’ve had plenty of success with bringing in VDBs and happy to report no issues there.

When it comes to using the “Export: Particles” node in Embergen, it doesn’t look like I have many options there, and what I get is an alembic export of the particles from Embergen that do not have any mesh data included - only particle data such as position, age, etc. I suspect this is all expected behavior.

I’m stuck on the next step - the alembic file does not import into Unreal in a traditional sense - meaning if I try to drag it from the explorer into a content folder, where I’m greeted with an ordinary ABC import dialog, the import fails to come in. It seems fairly evident that the ABC import in Unreal expect mesh data, but doesn’t see any, so it thinks something’s wrong.

So I’m in search of the correct way of bringing alembic formatted particle data into Unreal. Would that be through a Niagara system? Is there any endorsed or known working method for bringing those particles into Unreal? I think IDEALLY I wouldn’t bake those particles down to meshes in ember, or export them as a VDB (as I’ve seen suggested elsewhere). I would LOVE to have ground-up control of them in Unreal so I’m getting all the fabulous particle data from Embergen while using Unreal’s tools to decide how to RENDER it - how to color the particles over their age, what geometry to instance onto them, and so on.

Is there any support or step-by-step how-to for getting the particles out my Embergen project and into Unreal which still give me lots of control over their appearance once I’m in Unreal?

Thank you so much!

2

Hey thanks for reaching out about this, you’re correct that all of this is expected behavior. What comes out of EmberGen are particle points which don’t have any mesh data, but you can use a DCC like Blender to instance objects on to the particles and export that out as an alembic for Unreal Engine to import.

The trouble is that we have encountered some issues with other applications reading the particle export data, and we have not been able to solve that yet. So you can still use your particles if you only need simple geometry, but the color, lifetime, size and density parameters might not be properly imported with the points.

We are working on a fix to this but it might not be ready for a number of months.