How to achieve a realistic game explosion with EmberGen

Technical & Engine Help General Help
#1

Hey everyone!

I’m using EmberGen to create explosions and then rendering the flipbooks to use inside Unreal. I’ve noticed that EmberGen can be used for realistic explosions for film. I’m trying to understand what the best workflows and techniques are to achieve a very high quality look for games. Since there’s limited resources and want to achieve a good 360 look inside Unreal without having to rely on Niagara Fluids

I’m encountering challenges like this:

  • Using multiple layers in one flipbook is making the effect look “flat” inside of Unreal, since its just a rendered image, it doesn’t have any depth
  • I want to create the omnidirectional smoke trails (e.g. fanning out from a single point) but once again I don’t know how to achieve a more 3 dimensional look with the EmberGen flipbooks

If any of you have tips or tricks to overcome these challenges, I’d really appreciate it! Suggestions I can test are also welcome. Thanks!

#2

Can you share how you’re rendering the explosions?

#3

For the explosions, if they’re not displayed at the background, render top view of it and use some kind of 6 point lighting, otherwise everything will be flat.

Or if that’s only for a film stuff, render a vdb