Shadow Fox - VFX Sketchbook

Personal Work
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I’ve long been a lurker on these forums and I was never 100% confident in anything, so I hadn’t posted. A few of my instructors at Full Sail encouraged me to post on this forum and get feedback. I just didn’t want to be the Spongebob meme where the fish says, “get a load of this guy.” So I waited until I had a more polished Niagara effect for the community to lend their insights to.

A bit about the work -
I pieced together different parts of several tutorials in order to achieve the look I wanted and I also had to do some critical thinking on my part in order to get certain elements to work. The biggest aggravation I encountered was trying to fake the caustics. I racked my brain over and over because I wanted it to be a standalone Niagara effect and not a pretty thing in a sequencer.

It turns out that I overthought it. In case this helps someone else, the caustics were created by using the light renderer in tandem with a separate emitter that used a single sprite with a caustics material. It’s no different than how you would go about creating an impact decal for an effect.

6 Likes
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I just wanted to say that this looks great, especially the explosion part. And the caustics part is a nice touch.

No reason to be ashamed at all.

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I think this looks fantastic. I’d be interested how you got the middle water orb to distort.

Also the camera shake, was this put into a blueprint to get that shake?

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Thanks a lot! The camera shake is a blueprint that is called inside of Niagara.

Screenshot 2025-06-26 150655
Screenshot 2025-06-26 1506552401×1208 460 KB

As for the distortion orb, it is primarily in the material. The separate solid sphere that glows is an emitter inside of Niagara.

william-turner-waterorb-material
william-turner-waterorb-material1920×1080 421 KB

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Pretty awesome man, great work.

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Does the camera shake BP just fires when the particle spawns? And you just plug that into the component renderer?

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Niagara treats the camera shake as it does any other renderer. Either set it to delay so that it’s in sync or set it as a child of another emitter that begins at the same time you want it to shake.

I learned it from this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGXFERdnSCU

1 Like