Was working on something unrelated and found this old project I did in UE4 a year ago during the closed beta. I had it set to private for obvious reasons (we were all under NDA) and totally forgot to make it public after UE4 was released. It’s pretty old work now, so there’s a lot of polish I would do to it, but I don’t feel like investing that time now
I was experimenting with BP at the time, I was originally going to hand animate lightning FX through Matinee, but then convinced myself to use BP to make a procedural lightning system instead- which I ended up doing. At random times, a BP will fire off lightning functionality that includes, FX, lighting, and random thunder sounds. Threw the whole thing together in one weekend.
Wow looks just like a movie man! Such good lightening and that industrial steel look!
Wish I had sound (at work) to go with it
Thanks for sharing mate!
This is something I will eventually make a tutorial for sometime in the future, there just isn’t a lot of information and tutorials out there for FX in games.
Essentially, here is a quick overview of my typical workflow:
create FX in a 3D package or sim software (i.e. Maya, Softimage, 3dsMax, Real Flow, etc.))
render out an animation of the FX, I usually use mental ray
take the animation into After Effects, comp it, touch it up, polish it, etc.
render out my After Effects work as an image sequence
I use a special script in Photoshop that takes my image sequence, and creates an atlas (Flipbook texture)- this is a single image that contains all my image frames in order)
import my new flipbook texture into UE4
create a new material that uses the flipbook texture
setup a new particle system with Cascade that uses the flipbook texture and plays the sequence of frames in the flipbook
That’s the quick and dirty of what I do for most of my FX work.
