UDK Cascade - Pawn particles at start of anim

Norron

The thread title doesn't really explain what I need help with but I'll try better.

I'm trying to make a bubble pop effect by spawning mesh actors instead of particles and having a panning wavy material applied to them. The problem is that the material pans constantly and doesn't have a set start and end point. So when a mesh spawns whenever it decides to it may spawn with the uvs in the correct spot or partway through the pan.

I'm not sure if I can force the meshes to spawn in a way that they start where I want them to. I wonder if I could have control over this if the mesh UVs were animated instead of in the material instead but I'm not sure how to set something like that up.

Thoughts? See the screenshot for some of my cascade set up.

Visceral

Not really sure what you are after, but if you multiply a Time node with a Dynamic paramter you would have control over the speed of the panner inside of cascade.
You can allways use a channell of the dynamic param to change stuff inside your material from Cascade.

Norron

I guess I didn't explain what I'm after too well. I need a mesh particle to spawn with it's uvs enveloped with the white in the material and then have it panned down over the uvs to make it look like a bubble forming and popping. The problem is I can't figure out if I can control that.

If I hook up the panner to a dynamic parameter I guess I could make the particles spawn at a set rate and time the panner so it's always at the point I want when they spawn. Maybe. Not really sure.

imbueFX

If I understand you correctly, Visceral's suggestion is in the right direction. You can directly control a panner if you plug in a dynamic parameter into the 'time' input of your panner. You would then animate the dynamic parameter inside of Cascade (from 0 to 1 in time).

Alternatively instead of using a panner, you can use an IF expression compared against a gradient and achieve a similar result.

Norron

Thanks for the help. I think i get what you guys are saying now and what I have to do to make this work the way I want.

I'll give it a shot and if I run into more trouble I'll post more.

Visceral

Yeah you can get a really cheap and easy gradiant just by masking out the Green channel from a texture cordinate node with a component mask nodel.
Howeve you might want a secondry uv channel just for that effect if your sphere is uv'd from the top.