Particles

Another thing I wanted to add to the scene were particle systems, mainly smoke and fire.

To begin with I used a YouTube tutorial by Pub Games here and the UE4 Documentation here

These helped with the creation of these particles as prior to this, I had no experience using the particle systems in either UDK or UE4.

To begin with I imported a smoke texture and a roiling fire texture

These then had to be made into a material that would be used for the particles.

 

In this the two panner nodes move the materials opposite ways to each other at different speeds to create the illusion of movement in the fire. 

• We multiply them together into one and mask the Red/Green channels followed by scaling the smoke texture. 
• The top node allows use to colour the fire particles. 
• We multiply the multiplied texture and Particle colour nodes and add them to a depth fade finally plugging them into Emissive for colour and Opacity for fading.

Once the material has been made, we add it to the particle system in Cascade. 

Here we can see the resulting fire with parameters. The 2nd and 3rd particle emitters are the smoke and sparks around the flames. Despite the setup of the material being complex at first, with repetitive use, this became easy to do and Cascade is a simple tool with use.