I’ve been studying how to use niagara data channels after learning about their existence in the last UE fest in summer. There are virtually no documentations, no guides, so I was pretty much left alone. I wanted to use it to spawn my guns’ muzzle flashes and bullet impact vfxs since they will be spawned constantly and I needed a way to manage their memory effectively. My game was suffering from memory buildup and I needed some way of object pooling anyway.
However, when you try to spawn a data channel, or rather write to one, you need to manually set everything yourself. That includes location and rotation, which is automatically dealt with when you are just using a ‘spawn niagara system’ node. You can’t even attach it from the data channel node itself, and have to tweak a lot of things in the niagara system asset. This caused a lot of problem for me at first because I used to use just prebuilt assets that I got from various places, and they all had different ways of dealing with rotation. In retrospec, I think the location was the easier part, but that does not mean it went well smoothly. What they don’t tell you is: the data channels spawn at 0,0,0 whenever they are called, so I thought I was doing something wrong while testing, since I was seeing two effects. However I soon found out that it was just how it is, and I can just raise everything above y=0, so it would be hidden from players’ view. To rotate a data channel, it is different for every asset, but I had to make a separate variable to handle the rotation, and plugged it in to whatever internal variable for the data channel reader that handles the niagara system.
Was it worth it? Yes, absolutely. I see a lot of people saying things about unreal for its poor performance, and how developers don’t optimize their games. However there are these kind of things that can help everyone out, but they just don’t tell you about them. I didn’t know this was a thing before I listened to that one seminar from the 2025 UE fest. I wish they would just care about the documentations a bit more, it would really help everyone out.
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