I wanted to do a laser effect with the limitation of not using any textures. So I made this combination of niagara emitters. There is also no blueprint or other form of programming involved apart from making the head of the turret rotate.

Laser

The first and main particle system was the laser itself. It simply fires particles very very fast into a direct with a very slight cone angle. The renderer is a ribbon renderer. The particles all get killed when they precisely hit the ground, but the particles all have different starting positions because of the speed. In order to hide this I made a shader that fades out the ribbon in the beginning.

This is the emitter that checks for collision. The two ground effects receive this collision event.

Ground

Wherever the particles hit, two more particle systems appear. One consists of sparks that get shot in a cone angle depending on the collision normal. The other is more like a trail effect when the laser moves. Some kind of impact that shows the ground has become hot there, it’s supposed to look similar to being welded. Both are sprite renderers and have the default sprite material assigned to them.

Emitter Sparks

Lastly, there is a particle system around the emitter itself to add to the feeling of the laser “shooting outwards” if that makes any sense. I am not quite happy with this one, and I think it’s mostly because it is very similar to the ground sparks.

Final Niagara Effect

Here are all of the effects separately again, and then together.

And here are the four emitters.

What I like is that none of them have really a lot of particles. All of them combined never result in more than 2500 particles. It could definitely be improved by allowing to use textures, although I think the result is fine for the limitations it had.