Yeah you stuff looks really cool. I think the style goes almost a bit into the rime-fire, but without the use of textures <3
Yes, I saw your great presentation about that fire, and I was surprised that you decided to go particle way…
It is exactly how it was made in the first version of my fire, but now I’m trying to get rid of the noise.
I tried a bit around and when you multiply your UVs with let’s say 4.0 and floor() the R-channel, you get bands of different shades of gray. With that in combination in doing the same with G-Channel and some offsetting I got some ok-ish pattern for adding more chaos to the grow/shrink-behavior. I had to do this because I didn’t got the noise running in Unreal like you did in Unity.
Now you are building custom noise functions based on UV input. You guys are sick! 
Does unreal allow you to create custom nodes? if yes it should be easy to implement your own noise, you can find lot’s of noise source code on shadertoy
@PixelPerfect good idea with the custom nodes. you’re right, it’s possible to write hlsl 
I worked a bit more into the direction of flipbooks because i liked the style a bit more, the particle-based system gives me a bit more artistic control and in general I was interested to complete the workflow.
NEW:
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Flipbook is now kind of loop-able
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I used nearest-neightbor-filtering on a 2nd render target (and size only 256x256px) to get a cute pixel-style
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@simonschreibt I love seeing your stuff and then reading through the threads. Your problem solving skills are in incredible.
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I think it could be quite interesting to try and up-res the pixelated one or just find a way to non-uniformly blur the high res output. That could end up breaking apart the circular shapes even more.
Should the circular shapes really need to be broken appart?
It’s not necessarily just a technical constraint, it can be embraced as a stylistic choice and therefore not be hidden.
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@colbaltblue thank you!
Found a way to do the pixelation in the shader. No extra render target needed (but the one I was using before can be set to lower resolution. For this example I use 256px insteaf of 1024px)
@mkalt0235 Yes, you’re right! I’m totally going for the disc-style! That Kung-Fu-Panda-Vid is my main reference and I love it The pixelation is just a little test for fun
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I worked on the flame itself and added more detail. Hope you like it
Higher resolution:
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Tried around putting the flipbook on a ribbon-particle:
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Trail looks very fluent and great
I love the flexibility if you want to tweak the texture, just nudge a few params in the particle simulation and voila! I really like workflows that speed up iteration times
The pixel one is very neat, well done
Do you think the nodes can “pixelate” every textures / effect, or it’s just relative to the workflow you use ?
@Ludvig Thanks Yes, it’s fun to tweak the particle system, play and see what comes out. And if the loop-transition in the Flipbook didn’t work out too well, just hit play again and hope for a better version. And if you’re satisfied, you can even create a static texture out of the flipbook and never bake again (of course, for this challenge it must stay realtime because only 1 circle texture is allowed).
@Jordanov Thank you! What I was doing, is to pixelate the UVs. So you could use that for every texture/effect where you feed effects into.
This looks so good! Aaawww yeah, I recognize the Rime style here 
I can’t tell how often I watched your stylized VFX in RiME presentation - it was a lot. So many great tipps
This tread is really fun, I love to seing your detailed breakdown, thanks a lot.
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I just came here to say this looks amazing. I will be coming back to read more into your techniques, because I really like the style you have, but yeah, keep it up.
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Thank you for the kind words @Shr1mpsy and @MGDubois !
Here’s a little update. I think I’ll wrap it up soon.
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Another little test for different shader-styles:
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Absolutely love the effect in the middle!
How is it made up if you don’t mind me asking?