A colleague of mine urged me to join RT VFX sometime ago and I finally remembered to do it today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngukQgwK-yU
This is a recreation of the attack spell “Megido” from Shini Megami Tensei III Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga which were released for PlayStation 2 for more than 14 years, but I am personally very fond of this particular effect. That’s why I was keen to see how far I can go with Niagara (UE 4.27).
The trails are not ribbons because ribbon renderer must be CPU sim. Don’t understand why Epic can’t give us GPU ribbon yet. Instead they are GPU sim, interpolated, velocity-aligned stretched billboard sprites reading positions from source emitter via PAR.
Lightning arcs are basic arc mesh but fiddled with World Position Offset in material.
Referenced Gabriel Aguiar’s tutorial for the soccer ball sphere.
Yes I know the smoke particles don’t look pretty, because my stamina is running low during these cold days.