Wow, super cool idea! Looks awesome. I like the chain lightning idea. May I suggest adding a few swirly residual dust pieces for a second or two after each one is disintegrated, giving you a lasting thing to look at? Or maybe put a little sword or shield in 2-3 of the undeads hands, forcing them to drop to the ground after they are gone
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Added blueprint functionality that chains a lightning beam to nearby zombies. This in turn activates their “death” state, which plays the animation, the new disintegration particles, and sets the dissolving material timeline, in addition to checking again for nearby enemies. Repeat until they are all dead.
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Using one of the variants of the Paragon character Greystone, I’m working off this Thor reference for the lightning attack.
The lightning gets wonky at the end there. I’m using the Spline Thicken function in the material. If you’re not familiar with it, basically you make a thin strip of polygons that have almost no width to them, and then you can set the width in the function, and it will camera-face the polys. I added some noise world position offset on top of that, and it’s just cranked up too high in this gif.
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Ohhhhhhh boi this looks goooood!!
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Almost ready to post the final product! In the meantime, here’s a little sample of some of the lightning elements I created for this, along with a parallax occlusion decal I made using Substance Designer. I just wanted something like a jagged scorch that looked like it had gouged into the ground. Not sure you’ll even really see it though. The ground is a blend of a few parallax occlusion materials with textures from Quixel.
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Ok here’s what I’ve come up with! This was a lot of fun. Thanks to @MrHamuel for a crash-course in Niagara, which is used for the lightning beams on the knight’s body during the jumping shot. And thanks to @jasonkey for sanity-checking my work and offering feedback. Much appreciated as usual.
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Wow, so much stuff there…awesome work! 
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First time I saw it I think it was a movie! This is mind-blowing work! well done Nick.
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amazing work as usual Nick 
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This is awesome. I seems like a movie. 
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Oh… oh wow. Just amazing. You captured the themes you set out for so well, praise the sun!
A breakdown of this effect would be awesome!
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This is beyond good ! Amazing stuff wow !!!
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Much appreciated! Is there anything in particular you would like to see?
The majority of the work was blueprint, and it was all triggered by one invisible sphere that scaled up over time, matching the radius of that ground shockwave. That way, the overlap event could trigger the death state on the zombies, playing a death animation, setting them to ragdoll, applying a backwards force, playing disintegration particle systems (niagara, so it could play on the skeletal mesh surface), and eroding the material of the zombies with an emissive edge until they were gone.
This also triggered them to check a radius around them, and connect a quick lightning beam from their chest socket to the chest socket of the neighboring zombie (and this also triggered the death state, applying all those effects I mentioned above). Basically the whole thing was like knocking over a line of dominos, and any zombies that were missed by the chain lightning beams were caught by the giant invisible sphere (that matched the big ground shockwave radius).
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This is looking fantastic man! Really digging the chain lightning nuke
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Can anyone help me with niagara particle system.
I actually want to propagate particles on the mesh like on skeletal mesh {i want to propagate particles from bottom to top / from hand to the whole body} and it should look connected to the mesh.
That’s awesome! thank you for the rundown.
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Sick! Awesome work! Feels like pre render VFX already!
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This turned out real nice! Great job!
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Knocked it out of the park mate! 
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That looks freaking awesome, dude!