Hi, I’m new to these forums so I’m not sure if this is the right place to put this or not. I’m wondering how to make this glowing VFX and that wispy, ethereal smoke effect that wraps around the sword blade.
I’m making a stylized weapon in the same style as Valorant and I want to add a similar effect but I am new to VFX so I’m to exactly sure how to achieve that in UE4.
Could be done by layering multiple elements such as:
Particle sprites with wispy textures appearing on top of the blade
Some kind of geo resembling the shape of the blade with a noise / wispy texture panning through it
“Faking” the blue glow / bloom by using geo such as planes on top of the blade and creating a blurry gradient texture that fits
Ahh okay! Do you have any good resources you could point me too that might help?
I don’t have any particular resources you could use but I’ve always loved the CGHow channel, they don’t go deep into how things work and you may have to skip through a lot to find what you need, but I find it extremely useful for when I just can’t wrap my head around how to start a specific thing, I can usually find an effect on their channel and get a decent idea of the method they used.
The best practise is just to try something, anything, if it doesn’t work you can usually look at it and have a better understanding why it isn’t. Grab some random cloudy textures and start emitting them, I’m always surprised by the enlightenment that happens 
Hi, my experience says that there is only second mesh without any particles.
This glow and smoke can be done using only one material and shader with side transparency like here: Archer VFX tutorials - #7 by Hovl
Awesome! Thank you for this I’ll take a look at it and start playing around with it
Oh sweet! Thank you for the link! Would be able to recreate this in UE4? I see that your shader is made in Unity
Just use face sign node in Unreal. All the same)
For example, I made the same smoke effect using standard capsule because sharp sword edges is very bad fir it.
Oh this is awesome! Thank you so much. I’ll play around with it in Unreal to try and get that effect
Anyway, it’s better to make smoke around the sword using simple particles and glow using model with similar shader, because simple planes look bad on some angles.
