ExplosionTober #24 - Calamity
This theme really puzzled me for a while, I couldn’t think of anything better than a nuke 
Anyway, this was a good excuse to experiment with Embergen again, this time I baked two parts of the same simulation onto separate spritesheets and projected them on meshes to avoid it from looking too flat.
Also, the colors on the recording are darker than what it looked like inside Unity for some reason, but I didn’t really have time to find out why.
ExplosionTober #25 - Solar 
ExplosionTober #26 - Shatter
More experiments mixing Embergen and VFX Graph, I’m starting to really like this workflow!
One thing that still bothers me a lot is motion vectors: it looks like Embergen normalizes them which is quite annoying since that means I have to manually scale them over lifetime based on some AnimationCurve so it doesn’t look weird at some points.
If anyone has a better solution, I’d love to hear it!
Also maybe this would have been a better fit for the Concrete explosion from the first day 
ExplosionTober #27 - Sticky 
Missed yesterday’s explosion, I wasn’t satisfied (at all) with what I made and didn’t have enough time to improve it or make another one so I dropped it, but here is today’s!
ExplosionTober #29 - Sand 
Youtube’s compression really didn’t like this one, lots of details are lost especially in 1080p and lower…
ExplosionTober #30 - Bubbles 
ExplosionTober #31 - Seance 
Final day of ExplosionTober! I didn’t have much time for this one so it’s mostly a mix of some effects from the previous entries, but it works well enough 
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Big thanks to everyone who followed my work during these past weeks, and to @LauraVFX for creating this event! It was a good excuse to experiment with a bunch of new tools, techniques and styles, and I’m really happy with some of these!
I just found an old VFX I made over a year ago and forgot to post!
I had this weird idea for a bomb that would grow plants when exploding. The effect is made of multiple parts:
Also, I finally started to post my work on ArtStation! You can see some stills of this effect here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/bgebqv
I started playing with UE5 a few months ago, mostly trying and learning a bunch of different things. This is one of the first effects I made with Niagara, never got around to post it online so there we go:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JrAAoZ
Expect more UE5 things coming from me soon! 
Cool! Im curious how you add the drip trails after it’s splashed on the wall 
It’s quite simple! Here’s what the texture looks like:
As you can see, the drips are on a separate channel from the rest of the splatter. Every drip has a gradient going from top to bottom, so I can just do a smoothstep on that channel to get the dripping effect, then combine that result with the rest of the splatter.
The amount of drip is controlled from the Niagara system using a curve over lifetime.
I also take into account the normal of the surface below the decal inside the shader so we get less drip the more horizontal the surface is.
Here’s what the whole thing looks like in pseudo-code:
// Check if the surface below the decal is upwards.
float surfaceAngleMultiplier = abs(dot(surfaceNormal, float3(0, 1, 0)));
// Here I subtract the surfaceAngleMultiplier from the drip texture to modulate the max amount of drip,
// so the more horizontal the surface, the less it will drip.
float drip = saturate(splatter.g - surfaceAngleMultiplier);
// Smoothstep using the param sent from Niagara.
float result = smoothstep(dripAmountSetFromNiagara, dripAmountSetFromNiagara + someBlurAmount, drip);
And an image from the material:
That’s genius. Thanks for sharing the idea 
Incredible work, inspired me a lot.
Thank you so much 
Really digging your work in the latest sketch btw!
Thanks, always happy to share with the community here!
