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[Tutorial] UE4 Niagara Audio Spectrum Analysis Visualizer — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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[Tutorial] UE4 Niagara Audio Spectrum Analysis Visualizer

vjfader · 3,618 words · 18 min read · EN

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Below is the complete, readable transcript of [Tutorial] UE4 Niagara Audio Spectrum Analysis Visualizer by vjfader on YouTube. Read the full text, copy any part you need, or generate a transcript for any video with our free tool.

in this tutorial i'm gonna cover how to create um i'm gonna show you how to create uh how to how to create how to hi this is vijay fader in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to create audio spectrum analysis in niagara particle system many of you have requested this tutorial

so here it is we're gonna make something like this take a look [Music] cool let's dive right in so i have a niagara system created here it's almost blank i already got started here to save some time but i can walk you through on what i've added here the first thing i changed is i changed

from cpu simulation to gpu compute simulation just because you know you want to utilize the gpu power so you can push a lot of mesh particles in niagara i normally go with gpu simulation and when you do that you have to take this fixed bounding box option what that does is you can

determine you know within a certain bounding box that this niagara system will appear in front of the camera so i normally just put a really huge value here for example 10 000 in minus and then 10 000 plus and the other thing i've added is spawn burst instead of spawn rate it instantaneously makes

however many particle you designate so in this case i put one count as 10. i put the spawn time as something really small 0.01 per second so that it's constantly pumping out 10 particles if we take a look at the preview i'm going to drop this particle system onto my level here i'm gonna drop it in the center reset

the position you can see yeah there's only one cube basically all of the particles are all spawned at the same location on top of each other so that's why you only see one cube here even though there's hundreds of cubes and quickly i want to go over particle mesh renderer i disable the sprite render because i

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normally go with a mesh particle so in the particle mesh i picked something very simple so i picked the default cube by the way i'm using the starter content assets so here i pick the cube and the cube as you can see in the details it only has 24 vertices and 12 triangles so it's kind

of one of the most basic mesh you can have available that's kind of you can use that as sort of a benchmark so if you go higher in the mesh count then you have you might have to have lesser number of particles depending on your gpu power and your you know computer for the material i take the overwrite

and then you have to add an element so you can assign your custom material for your mesh and in this case again i picked the stock mtech hex tile so basically i created a blank a niagara particle system and this is the settings i have so far and then we're gonna get into

uh visualizing our particle system using spectrum particle system using audio spectrum data add a spawn location instead of everything spawning from a point i'm going to use a torus under particle spawn i'm going to hit plus and then type in location and then pick torus location i'm going to set the radius to say something like 200 handles

radius to be zero so taurus is like a donut handle radius is basically how thick your donut is and i'm going to set that to zero so essentially i'm just creating a ring here for the axis i want this to point towards me in the x axis so i'm going to take the

taurus axis checkbox and then put that x value to 1 and then z value to 0. we can hop back into the level and then see that all right we got all these cubes spawning that's a taurus ring here and here we're going to do some tricks uh what i want to do is i want to have

burst count of 10 cubes to be evenly distributed around this ring of circle how do we do that um instead of a random distribution basically it's going to randomly put every cube on you know the entire ring i'm going to do direct and what happens when you do direct by default is it only designated to a certain point

in this ring right so if you go say u position of like 0.5 it goes to another point on this ring so instead what i would do and something i discovered something called execution index and if you choose a normalized execution index for the u position then your cubes that's being spawned 10 of them

are being placed evenly around this ring so that's pretty cool effect and after that i want all the cubes to face to the center so right now they're kind of all placed in their original orientation and basically i want them to all orient towards the center and how do we do that we can create

another note here orient mesh to vector it gives you a look at direction right this look at direction give us direction to all the cubes at the same time however i want each individual cube to look at the center in order to do that we need to here do some sort of a niagara node magic here by

creating a new scratch dynamic input and let's call this one orient to center what a scratch dynamic input is is kind of a custom blueprints you can create inside of niagara so it makes niagara super powerful when you can do custom things so in here we're going to create an input that gets the position value of

each cube when they're being spawned right because they're basically each have a unique position so you just type in position here and then we're going to find this particle position secondly we need create a vector3 input value so it's called a new vector3 and then you can double click this and change the name of this variable

let's call this uh look at position right very cool so this this value we're gonna change or input later to solve this and convert this into a vector sort of a normalized vector value what we need a node called a normalized distance normalized distance range a node that will calculate the vector based on these two

input values right so the original position and then a look at position so we're going to hook the position as the start position of the particles and then the look at position to be the end position right and then the distance don't need to worry about that and at the end all we need let's make this a

little bit bigger the normalized vector between positions so we're going to take that and send it out as an output and that's all there is if we pop back out this orient mesh to center has this orient to center o1 that we have created the look at position we can go and take

this box and type in engine owner position oh simulation position all right so now they're kind of all pointing towards the center and that's kind of the effect i was looking for next what i want to do is add a a force a constant force so that all these cubes can radiate outwards so to do that i'm gonna go

add velocity from point right whenever when you see these uh red warning boxes um it's not a big deal nine out of ten times you just click on this fixed issue and then it fixes for you so in this case if you click on that it basically adds this apply initial forces to this chain of modules

so by default it's set to 100 but if you can see in the preview that it's still not moving that's because in the particle update we need something to solve this velocity type in solve so we got solved forces and velocity if you don't have it then it will it will not actually make it move

now we have this moving can press compile and save and let's take a look in the preview here voila so we have sort of like star of cubes radiating out from the center pretty cool let's continue now we're going to finally get into creating another custom module taking the spectrum audio analysis data and affecting

all of these cubes and before i get into that i want to quickly talk about what is actually a audio spectrum basically as you all know audio volume meter that you have seen probably in you know recording software so basically tells you how loud the volume is right what spectrum data does is laid out from

uh left to right and low frequency on the left and high frequency on the right right so one so basically one end it represents low frequency and the other end represents the high frequency and of course our ear can only hear certain range of frequencies and you can think of the whole spectrum at any given time

as representing a whole the entire range of sound that's uh being outputted and this data is can be represented in bands or so-called resolutions that's why you have these bands here in reality you know the real frequency has infinite resolution but in digital sound or in especially in visualizing spectrum we can pick and choose how many bands we want

to visualize this is basically what a spectrum analysis data can look like in a very basic form it's very two-dimensional keep that in mind so we hop back into our niagara system really what i do with audio spectrum is i use it to affect the scale or the size of my mesh right so in the particle update i'm

going to go ahead and add mesh scale size here for the mesh scale size it's asking for a vector3 value so xyz in scale and what i do is i normally i will turn that into a a single float value so i type in float here and then you go from vector to from

float what that does is use just one value to a uniform scale of your mesh instead of doing a vector three because this mesh scale size value is referencing the initial mass scale so we're going to go back to inertialized particle here and tick from by default is unset and we're going to change that to

uniform scale and by default it has a scale value of 1 and that's fine from here what we would do is we're going to add our custom new scratch dynamic input here and let's call that audio spectrum float meaning that it's going to output a single value at the end of this and what's what's

great about these uh dynamic inputs is you can reuse them for other uh in other places in other modules and uh instances for the purpose of this tutorial we're going to use this to only affect the size of our particles we're going to add an input node and just type in spectrum new audio

spectrum you can drag out from that type in spectrum pick audio spectrum here this is what's wonderful about niagara system is it has audio spectrum analysis module built in so that you don't have to take that from outside of the blueprint for example you can do your analysis all within niagara you have this

thing called normalized position in spectrum this took me a while to figure out what that actually meant remember this picture that i showed earlier it goes from low frequency to high frequency in a linear fashion kind of a from left to right right so what that normalized value is asking is basically the position of the

spectrum from zero to one zero meaning for example low frequency and one is the high frequency if you just put in for example uh zero then it's only gonna output all the spectrum data from the lower end of the frequency so it's just like one value right so ideally what you wanna do is you want to

put in a value based on each particle that each particle position or in this case what i'm going to demonstrate is using the particle age on the input node here we're going to add something called normalized h and normalize typically means is a value from 0 to 1. and we're going to connect that

to the normalized position in spectrum so basically depending on the age of the particle meaning that when it was born is zero size is one and our particle system if you look at the initialized particle here it's set to lifetime of five seconds i i hope that makes sense and this last uh input channel index is

basically zero uh zero is like left channel audio one is right channel audio so it's stereo sound you only have one zero and one in most cases i only visualize mono which is just left channel audio so you can just leave that as zero and once you get the value out as an

amplitude so you want to maybe scale that somehow uh to actually see what's happening because if you scale it just from zero and one it could be not very much of a difference also you want to add a perhaps a default value so that they don't start out as zero which is you don't see it what i would add at the

end of this is basically a multiply add node basically helps to reshape the value so to something that's more useful so i'm gonna create two more input nodes here so i'm gonna add two floating variables here and change name for the first one let's say call that magnitude and then the second float is gonna be

our default size right you can kind of guess what we're going to do with that so we're going to multiply by the magnitude and then add our default size and then output that as our final value once you apply you can actually go back and change the default value of these and here you have to again put it back

to one because i created the scratch module first so it doesn't take default value for the audio spectrum create a user parameter so you can also select say master sub mix default here but instead of doing this this here uh i would create a user perimeter because i found out that if i don't do that then i have

to open up this niagara system in order for the audio analysis to work if you go to this user parameter section here and then click on add and then type in spectrum and this will be available in your niagara properties and here i can just assign master submix default and master summix default is kind of one of the default

sub mixes that comes with the engine i didn't create this and what that does is it will take all the audio that's coming from your level or your scene for the resolution i've leave it at default which is 512 again it's 512 band of resolution in your spectrum analysis minimum high frequency i've leave it as

default as well so i'm going to compile and save this and go back to my scale mesh size here i'm gonna open up this list and the first thing you see is this new user parameter that we have created so we're gonna use that i think we're ready for our initial test in my project i have some music

loops that i created loaded here you can kind of hear what this sounds like [Music] and it's already uh previewing in my preview window so but what i'm gonna do is i have created something called a sound cue and you do that by right clicking on your audio and then just pick create q here

and this is the sound cue that i've created uh if you double click on it what i did is i added a looping node here so that way my music loop will loop indefinitely when i place it into the level so you can just drag this looping node here and then connect your output to

here and then output to output i can delete this old one and this is how you make your music loop forever and i'm gonna place this sound cue into my level and organize it under the audio folder a quick overview of what i have in the scene here these are all default sort of a scene

that i've deleted all the unnecessary things so the only two things that i've added is my music spectrum analysis niagara that we're making and then this sound cue hit play here you can see that oh this music is playing in my level and it's affecting my graph now let's make it a little bit more

dynamic and interesting so let's go back to our niagara system look at our values for default size and magnitude you know i can shrink my default size a bit say 0.3 yeah make my magnitude bigger let's make the audio effect a bigger size maybe a four to try it out and i'm gonna go back and

make my taurus ring smaller 75 cool let's take a look yeah it's already creating a very sort of interesting shape a lot of working with niagara is uh you don't always know what you're gonna get so you kind of have to experiment and manipulate with the values to almost discover interesting kind of uh results and uh this is kind

of already looking kind of funky let's let's let's keep going yeah i'm gonna put my windows side by side here so normally i wouldn't recommend working like this but what i found is this preview window in niagara is not a true representation of your particle system because it needs to continuously run and this timeline will

just stop at however many seconds so what i would do is i will play my level and constantly change my values in my niagara system to see it update as it's playing so that way i can continuously work on it and without stopping and kind of like going back and forth too much

first thing i would try to change is maybe i make this uh life time longer so it has a longer legs on these array of next cubes maybe i add a rotation to the cubes uh let's go ahead and add add rotational velocity again click on this fixed issue button oh and you also need a solver

in the update so let's solve the rotational forces to have it actually apply the rotation and i think my rotation value is too high let's try one first oh my god that's cool x-axis oh that's already looking pretty pretty psychedelic here [Music] let's keep going let's push it let's push it a little bit because right now

we're not having technically that many particles uh we can go this can go much more the spawn count i can crank it up to say 30. now we have this audio reactive kind of a sun ray thing going on [Music] what you can do is add a little bit of noise in here

to make it a bit more organic meaning that uh in this particle spawn and not in the update but in the spawn i'll add a curl noise force [Music] let's fix this issue here cool so for the curl noise force uh i changed the noise strength to 30. uh i cranked down the noise frequency to 0.1

so this is a bit more detailed and i take the pen noise value and give it a little bit of pan so the the noise field will kind of evolve in time so it's not so it's not static right so the noise is not sitting still and let's take a look at our results

cool it's it's a week i think we kind of made like a sound flower type of thing going on that reacts to the music not bad [Music] leaning towards the psychedelic side of visuals but it's pretty cool you can see there's some details here with all these cubes spinning that's that's uh pretty crazy and uh you can

see that this is very responsive uh it's running pretty fast because um there's not so much geometry here yes yeah so it's running at 60 frames per second on my full hd resolution output here so there you have it uh this is one of the first tutorials on niagara spectrum analysis in unreal

engine and many of you have requested so it took a lot of time for me to plan and shoot and edit this video so please do like and subscribe if you do have any tutorials suggestions or questions or comments you can leave it in the comments section below and finally you can download this

project on my patreon page