Hello everyone. I want to share some studies I made on making trails and the ribbon renderer in Unreal Engine's Niagara.
The textures where created with Substance designer.
Ribbons don't quite work the same in Niagara as they did in Cascade, For achieving the desired behavior of ribbons in Niagara I followed this video which explains pretty nicely the adjustments that need to be done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEN4z4dwpMo&list=LL&index=2&t=408s
The trail texture looks like this and it was done in substance designer...I use many of 1MaFx techniques that he shows in his video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGB-zxRPfwA
basically what I did is I subtracted a noise from a rectangular shape and warp it to generate some variation. from there I kept on doing more warp and directional warps and finally blending it all together.
Then in Niagara I used a cloud noise texture to erode the tail of the ribbon and a custom swirly noise to distort the texture itself. What's happening is that I'm using a gradient to be controlled by the normalized live of the particle and fading out towards the end of it. and then I'm adding motion with another noise texture and a panner. These concepts are explained in further detail in Jordan Hey's entry: https://www.artstation.com/kanoba/blog/p3yX/basics-of-ribbons-in-ue4
The system is rather simple, consisting of only 4 elements: A leader particle emitter, a ribbon emitter receiving the lead's location for spawning, a smoke sprites emitter that also receives the lead's location for spawning, and lastly just some secondary sparks that burst outwards:
Let me know if you had any questions !