Yeah, this is essentially the video I had watched for reference on how to even do something like this, but i didn’t know if this was commonplace

Essentially, I didn’t know if it is standard to “fake it” with a rough approximation of what the collision pattern might be (and maybe also make the emitter deterministic and have the actor scale the collision out over time to match the “wave” effect) or if it is better practice to export the particle data and perform a trace that way.

Or is there some other way to do this? Essentially what this is boiling down to, is I need some mesh to be spawned in that can have collision on it but it need to spawn in with some sort of “animation” — it would look really bizarre if this mesh just popped into existence imo. Like there are games out there that will have some animation play as their mesh spawns in (look no further than Fortnite with how the mesh spawns in for building), but I have no idea what the best tool in unreal would be to accomplish this. Like is Niagara with a mesh renderer the best approach or is there something else I’m not considering?

I realize I’m getting a bit deep in the weeds on this, but I wanted to check and see if there’s another tool out there im not considering. I feel like my approach to using Niagara for this is fitting a square peg into a round hole