FX Artist: Aitor Fernández
GameEngine: Unreal Engine 5.2
3DPackages : Blender 3.6 , Houdini 19.5, Substance3D Painter
Hardware used:
NVIDIA RTX 3090Ti
12th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i9-12900K 3.20 GHz
128 GB RAM
Artstation: ArtStation - FX Barrel Underwater Explosion - Unreal Engine 5.2
Youtube: FX Barrel Underwater Explosion - Unreal Engine 5.2 - YouTube
In this project, I wanted to showcase an underwater explosion of a barrel by applying various knowledge and software that I use in my daily work.
Here’s the workflow I followed:
I created the barrel model in Blender 3.6 and added more detail to the original geometry to enhance its appearance.
Using Substance 3D Painter, I designed the material for the barrel along with its respective UDIMS (texture maps).
In Unreal Engine, I set up a small level to place the barrel effect and illuminated the scene using Lumen and Nanite. I also utilized lightmapping for efficiency.
Once I had the scene prepared, I began working on the Rigid Body Dynamics (RBD) simulation of the barrel in Houdini 19.5.
The simulation involved a simple explosion where the debris rises upward while suspended.
I exported the entire RBD simulation of the barrel in FBX format and incorporated the animation into Unreal Engine.
For the Pyro Simulation in Houdini 19.5, I utilized the Sparse GPU Solver for faster iterations. The simulation was divided into three phases and exported in TGA format to be used as a flipbook within Unreal Engine.
While prioritizing the resolution of these textures, there is still room for optimizing their usage.
For the particle system, I utilized the Niagara module in Unreal Engine. It was employed for creating effects such as bubbles (using sprites), fish (using a material with world position offset), and dust (using a raster fluid simulator).
Bubbles: Each vertex of the explosive barrel mesh served as an emitter, with a module to stop particle instantiation at a certain height.
Fish: The fish material was a simple 2D texture with world position offset to introduce movement. I used Mesh Distance Fields to calculate the fish trajectory and avoid obstacles in the 3D environment.
Dust: I experimented with Niagara’s Fluid Sims to rasterize GPU-computed particles.
The main explosion of the barrel was achieved using a particle system that utilized the textures generated in Houdini 19.5 in flipbook format.
Since this is a proof of concept for a single effect, I animated the parameters to integrate the effects using the Sequencer in Unreal Engine.
I hope you enjoy it!
