In the years I spent with Unreal Engine I mostly fumbled around as a generalist, but I want to focus on VFX and Tech Art now, as they are most exciting for me. I hope a sketchbook here will help me improve, but also keep motivated.
Looking forward to sharing awesome stuff and getting plenty of feedback!
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I also wanted to briefly share my setup of my world, which I spent some time tailoring to VFX previews with some dark, moody lighting and atmospherics!
I also made a cool little system that will allow me to easily pop into an effect, hiding others and going to a close-up view of an effect with a pre-defined camera
The first thing I’ve been working on is this flipbook based pixel fire.
For this effect I mostly followed a method shared by Simon Trümpler! Here’s the Niagara System I made that will be used to bake the flipbook:
I simply baked the system into a flipbook using Unreal Engine 5’s built in “baker” at a resolution of 256x256 (32x32 for each tile) and set the resulting texture’s filter method to “nearest” (nearest-neighbor) to get the pixelated effect.
Then I just plugged it into a simple sprite material and system!
The next addition was some embers. For the quantized (pixel-style snap-to-grid) movement, I followed the example below shared by simonschreibt!
It’s just a single looping particle placed behind the emitter with scrolling, pixelated clouds. I’m still looking for a way to improve the pixelated effect so that it’s not so jittery, if anyone has any ideas let me know
I made an alternative pixel fire effect that is a more flexible variation of my last effect. For me sprites and particles is far more versatile and easy to work with (and more fun) than flipbooks.
I used the procedural pixelation function in Unreal Engine along with erosion using that same pixelation to get a cool effect.
Aligning sprite rotation to velocity and adding some curl noise had the nice side effect of making it look like there is some distortion!
