Hello, I’m vfx artist using unreal engine mostly.
these days, so confuse to choose…
Destruction → Chaos cache, houdini.
Explosion , liquid → niagara fluid, houdini, embergen, liquidgen.
I prefer to learn in unreal engine as possible as i can.
but not sure, maybe Houdini can make more flexible art style…
I want to know some opinions…
Hey Grida!
I’m also getting into VFX and from my experience, different tools excel in different areas. Houdini is veryyy powerful and flexible and at the same time it requires a lot of effort to get good quality results. It does give you full control over parameters and simulations…meaning a lot of art direction, tweaks can be done, but that comes at the cost of a very steep learning curve.
On the other hand, Unreal’s native tools are more streamlined and relatively to easier to use. Chaos is very straightforward for destruction but it doesn’t have the customization of Houdini. Niagara Fluids are great for procedural effects, and it’s not as advanced as Houdini for fluids, but it’s really great for realtime work inside the engine.
Embergen is perfect for explosions, smoke, and fire if you need fast, art directableoutputs. I have never used Liquidgen but my guess it’s the same as Embergen where you can get fast results but a limited customization relative to Houdini.
So the core idea is that software designed for specific tasks usually give better, and more customizable results than trying to force a general tool (i.e. Unreal Engine) to do everything.