Playing with Unreal 5 - Motion Graphics

Over the year - I have been dabbling around with Unreal to get a sense of how to use it for Realtime  Motion Graphics - and particularly Audio Reactive visuals. Niagra Particles were a great area to investigate that had much flexibility to explore and easy(ish) to setup with Blueprints.

Above is a simple Niagra Setup - rendering meshes at each particle point, this was a great place to start to get my head around the power of this system in Unreal 5 and see how far I could push my computer with realtime rendering.

Using Sam Schreuder's Niagra Particle tutorial example - which can be found here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UETAS5g-q4M&t=0s - you can quickly setup the basics of sound reaction that effects properties of the particle emitter. Short tutorial - and covers the fundamentals to investigate further. Only downside of this method - is that it is in game audio - rather than a live feed coming in from a linein/microphone ( that's on the todo list to explore )

Utilising a useful tutorial - by Sir Fanci - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JYyNucyMBk&t=0s - exploring the use of in game audio reaction - this is using Blueprinted Instances of Actors and use of audio synthesis plugin to extract the data - and apply as a graphic EQ. The tutorial was using Unreal 4 - so a bit of exploration of the interface to find the same functions in Unreal 5.

Feeling a bit more confident with blueprints - there is an amazing motion graphic course by Yu Fujishiro - which opens up the procedural qualities of using spawning via blueprinted actors. More of his creative tech tutorials - that open up OSC control - are next on my homework - https://yufujishiro.com/

Here it was good to investigate what you could do with the Media Texture plugin with Unreal. This effectively allows you to play video on any mapped object surface. Here it was combined as a light cookie material to add to a spotlight.

and to finish off - helping Joe Fowler on his presentation of his MAX/MSP - Colour / Data Composition research investigation -presented live at Peel Hall, Salford - as part of Sound And Vision - A Night of Live Music and Improvisation on March 23, 2023.

This applyed some of the explorations I was creating in Unreal as a live jam - to produce quick visuals to react to - as well as manipulating them live - effectively "game levels" being played on whilst Joe fine tuned to the video feed it was producing.