[UE5] (help pls!) Creating a gradual sword heating up material

[snail]

Hello! I’m making an flaming sword attack in UE5, I wanted to create an activation for it by having a spark at the base of the sword and then it heats up gradually like this:

then the fire trail gets activated.

I have made the spark and trail, I’m stuck on how to edit the material for this, I assume I do something noise related, pan it slightly and plug that into emissive, then make that into a scalar parameter and make it glow from 0 - 1. However, not sure how to approach doing this exactly or how to call it in blueprint…

I’m curious how someone else who is more experienced would approach creating an effect like this?

[cEssex]

There is a blackbody node in the material editor. Start with a greyscale gradient>Lerp>Blackbody>Emissive output. The min/max of the lerp will be the kelvin values of the black body node. Try something like 0-2000.

You can either add a parameter to the max of the lerp or relevel the gradient to control the glow.

- YouTube

Here is a quick youtube tutorial on changing material params via blueprint.

[snail]

thank you! this is great, I think this, combined with a mask so I can preserve the outer details of the albedo could work