Electric Blast, Houdini and Niagara Forever!

[UnitFX]

Hello everyone. While I have time, I decided to take on a new task.
Some time ago, I gained quite a lot of experience in creating lightning, I studied this issue and options for creating electricity for a long time. I did this on Unreal Engine 4. At that time, there were no GPU ribos, so creating lightning in this way was quite resource-intensive. And in general, I think that this is not the best way now. The big plus in this is interactivity and variability.

Then I turned to Houdini, this is my favorite software and then it helped me out. I had 3 options, vertex animation, static mesh and sprites.
Vertex animation proved to be the best way, although now I have managed to implement the approach only on a static mesh.

Of course, using geometry for lightning, you get one big problem, this is the geometry antialiasing, which at a distance looks like a large artifact. I will try to show what I got and how it can be fix.

In this project I’ll try to use everything except vertex animation.

Current result

The beginning of my work

Of course my reference will be Black Myth: Wukong, I think this game has the best lightning I’ve ever seen.

Final result

Electric Blast

[UnitFX]

I’m currently developing this idea, where the wave that will spread after the impact will leave furrows on the floor that will have glows inside

[UnitFX]

Just for testing a couple of lightning variants and final material setup for geometry.
Also had to update my lightning setup in houdini a bit.
These are procedural lightnings where only geometry is used and there is no vertex animation.

[UnitFX]

New update, so far it feels like it needs to be glowed and decals on the floor, then it will work better and more grounded…

[UnitFX]

Added some little things on the floor, slightly corrected some things in the composition and the number of lightning bolts. Added a general wave in the middle with big noise, I don’t know yet, it seems to be fine.

I want to say that I will not add lightning bolts anymore, but it seems that I can’t be stopped…
I really want to take up the glow, today when I added glow to small things on the floor, it immediately became better.
Tomorrow I think that I will finally take up the decal, we’ll see what happens. And then more lightning, a lot more needs to be added.

[Luos_83]

been lurking, i really dig the arcs!

[Jukerlaw]

Very cool. Are the arc branches made of ribbons?

[UnitFX]

Thank you Luos and Jukerlaw, I appreciate it.

Now I use only geometry and sprites, and for sprites I use not even Alpha composite or Additive, but Masked Material for sprites and some Meshes.
Sprites are primarily particles that don’t require volume and encompass the finer details.

Before starting work on this task, I spent one day researching ribbons. The first results were good, but when I thought about having 10 tracks with lightning, the ribbons were outputting 200-500 particles. I realized that could get expensive, as my scene will have a lot of elements, and if I want to use more ribbons, it could get too much.

I haven’t added sparks to the effect yet, but I plan to include them. I’m already thinking about how I can reduce their number to avoid increasing the particle count too much. I also plan to work on the character, so I’m trying not to go overboard with the particles.

When thinking about optimization, if this effect were something the character uses constantly, it would be expensive. However, if there are no other effects in the scene, like in a solo run or boss fight with a mostly empty environment, it makes sense to overload the effect with particles. Looking at the boss fight in Wukong, they used a lot of particles, but the location was almost empty with no other NPCs, so I think it’s normal that I have it now, but I would not include the ribons here.

For my effect, this is the number of particles so far

Examples with ribbons >

Partition Particles

6 ribbons with 20 particles each and don’t forget about Tessellation.
NS_ribbons UE 5.5.4

[UnitFX]

Finally the final result, all content was made only in Houdini

[simonschreibt]

amazing work, thanks for sharing all the details!

[UnitFX]

Yeah, you welcome, glad you like it

[Kitsuraga]

That is so insanely cool!

I am very interested in Houdini → Niagara pipelines. Could you explain your process more so I can attempt something like this?

[UnitFX]

In this project, there was no direct Houdini → Niagara connection. Such a connection does exist, but it’s costly in terms of performance because you need to store point caches exported from Houdini in memory, and that’s not always necessary. I use a different approach if the points aren’t dynamic.

The name of the project is more about the fact that Niagara has a modular system similar to Houdini, with all the quaternions and matrix, which basically lets you place a sprite or lightning bolt exactly as you need, almost without limitations.

A bit of philosophy
Another note in favor of Houdini from my side. Over the last 14 years working in VFX, I’ve tried quite a lot of software. I spent 5 years in After Effects with all the plugins — Red Giant, Sapphire, VideoCopilot, RevisionFX, and many smaller plugins and scripts. Later I worked in 3ds Max (with FumeFX and more), Cinema 4D, Nuke, ZBrush, Embergen, Adobe Flash, Substance Designer/Painter, plus Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, and a bunch of smaller tools for atlas recording, video, or gifs.

All these programs produce content of different kinds and qualities. Each of them is expensive to buy, but they do increase your potential (and, of course, your responsibilities).

When I started working in Houdini, I realized I didn’t need plugins at all — just my brain and a lot of time. The only downside of Houdini is that if you need something, you have to build it from scratch. Nowadays they’ve made a lot of presets, which really speeds up the workflow, and you don’t always need to “build a plane from scratch.”

If it weren’t for their new Copernicus or plugin Axiom, I wouldn’t have been able to let go of Substance Designer, After Effects, or Embergen.

About Embergen and Axiom: unfortunately, I don’t like Embergen’s smoke shader and its loop creation. It’s a quick tool that doesn’t require much effort and is very convenient, but if I want to improve something or work around its limitations — I can’t.

To sum up
Working in Houdini allows you to combine almost everything needed for VFX creation. Now it has a powerful 2D tool (which was missing before), and you can combine it with any 3D model, depending on your skills. There’s a strong alternative for smoke and fire simulations, liquid sims, vertex animation, the ability to build any geometry and any custom UVs you want. On top of that, you can render anything you need (mostly for smoke). The XPU render takes 30 seconds – 5 minutes for any complexity and detail level of smoke over 64–128 frames. And fire renders in just 10–30 seconds for 64 frames. ( video card 4090)

So yeah, I’m just a fan. That’s it.

[Glezito]

Hey! This VFX is working really well!
I am curious about the use of meshes to achieve what I show in the image below (or in general other elements of the effect but I think in there is more contained).
I am wondering how is the mesh shape and how the textures you created fit in there. Like, what is actually driving the shapes here? Mesh vs Texture. Is the Mesh the main curve/line that the lighting follows + the zigzaggy details is the texture? (Like what I’m trying to show in GoW ref).

And my last question is about the animation and motion, are the textures flipbooks or do you just achieve the motion through WPO? (or probably something else I’m not seeing xD)
I’m trying to figure out some things for my first lighting effect Would be great if you could breakdown / explain a bit those bits. Awesome work really inspiring. Thanks!

[UnitFX]

If I understood the question correctly, then you are interested in the geometry or sprites used for the trails that follow the weapon in your example.
I am not sure that it is possible to make good geometry that will follow the weapon, the question is not even whether it is possible to do it well, but whether it is necessary at all.
Due to the fact that the character can have completely different animations, then most likely it will simply be difficult to make the correct position of lightning using WPO for each animation. I think WPO can greatly distort the geometry of lightning.
Is it necessary or not. All these attacks with a hammer or sword happen very quickly and at this moment you can only catch the shape, but not the detail, in addition to all this, this happens very often, unless of course it is not the ultimate blow.

• Due to the fact that often, the geometry will take up resources. During combat, and especially in God Of War, you need every second and it does not matter at all what kind of effects are there, BELIEVE IT. I went through two parts on god of war difficulty level and the second, is extremely difficult. You absolutely do not need a load in such moments.
• I am sure that they use sprites for such attacks, in the place of the player, you will not be able to distinguish that it is a sprite or geometry, and therefore there is no point in making geometry.

I use sprites and geometry in my work for different purposes. In the main part, I have a Static Mesh geometry, which is WPO with animation. I am trying to emphasize the basis of the strike with volumetric lightning. Due to the fact that I have volumetric geometry in these areas, I can rotate it randomly and not strain myself in terms of angle, whether we look at it from the front or from the side, so I saved myself resources for work and did not sag in quality. But after the main lightning strike, I have residual ones, and there is no point in making geometry there, but I made another mesh to add a little volume, and the rest is on sprites.

[UnitFX]

Only Sprites

Only Static Mesh

[Glezito]

Thanks for the detailed answer! Yes, I am mainly trying to figure out the use of SMs in your last GIF.
I see 2 main elements: A) that bends upwards and B) that keep flickering aroun ground level.

So for instance, I am wondering about:
A) How does the mesh look like (in terms of shape and UVs) so that when you applied textures into it you can see it from all angles? Is a cylinder maybe (SM_Lighting_03?) or more like a twisted ribbon?. Then I guess you animate WPO in shader and blocked contact points with vertex color mask or similar. Then keep animating the rest upwards with more influence in the middle section.

and B) are these SMs already looking like fully formed lighting at their oringinal state? then keep flashing them at different rotations and almost no WPO?

[UnitFX]

Well, you ask quite a lot, I can’t reveal everything directly, and all these questions are more for a full lesson for an hour or 3 hours, and not a short comment. I didn’t come to this right away, I researched a lot and tried a bunch of options, this is really hard work for several years on different projects. So please excuse me. And this is in the portfolio section and not in the lessons section, I’m just showing what I can do.

[Glezito]

Hey, no worries I understand. I am just trying to decompose your effect but everything you already showed helps a lot.

I’m sorry if my questions were too intrusive. Thanks for your content.