Cool Effect! (or should i say hot?) . Thanks for the breakdown!
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Wall of text? You call THAT a wall of text. Psh. Whatever. 
Really though, this is super cool. Thank you for this! 
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Thanks for all the helpful info @jqarlsson. I have a question, if its a noob question, feel free to disregard. But why do you use NOrmal maps to distor your texture? And not like, just a regular black and white texture? Do the distortions come out cleaner? i just tried it last night, and they do look different, but I’m not really sure why, or how that makes it better if at all.
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I’m happy to provide some inspiration @slowdive!
Glad you liked it DeepspaceBanana! Happy to be breaking things down
@Mez, it felt like I was throwing a wall of text out there! So I tried to even it out with some pretty images. Like a childrens book! I’m really happy you like it! I want to update a few things when I get the time 
@pmiller - Well, since I’m not importing the texture as a normal map (selecting the option inside of unreal when importing textures) I shouldn’t really call it a normal map. It’s an RGB texture where I use the R and the G channel to make a 2 vector so I can use that to offset the U and V positions of the flame texture. I’m importing it as a vector displacement map in Unreal. The difference between vector displacement and normal map compression is pretty small though, in my case.
But like you said - it could be any grayscale texture made into a vector2. It could be two separate textures where you append both alpha channels to make a vector2 to distort the texture. Or any of the other channels for that matter.
If you import a texture with normal map compression it will automatically set the texture value range from -1 to 1 (as far as I’ve understood(?)) and if you use any other texture compression you will have to change that value range manually through the shader through a offset bias function if you want to be distortion the texture in both +U, -U and +V, -V
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That’s some really nice work, man! Very pretty!
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Thanks for that reply Jqarlsson , it wasnt making sense to me before, but thank you for clearing that up!
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Very nicely done, Sir! Thank you for the detailed breakdowns and the clean material graphs. 
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I’m happy to help! Let me know if you have any other questions
Thank you @BrianKohrman and @aarontheuser! It was a super fun sketch to be a part of. I’m excited to hear what the next will be!
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