Hey there fellow UE4 Developers,
I’ve been creating VFX for 11 years and I wanted to share my knowledge with the community.
Realistic Blood
I wanted to share a technique I recently perfected to paint blood that can be eroded in your engine of choice.
In this tutorial I go over every step in Photoshop, getting your textures in game, creating the shaders and then making the particle system for your new blood texture.
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/CheerfulMindlessDodo-max-14mb.gif
**Brute Force Volumetrics - not **ray marching
In our second tutorial I detail creating some brute force volumetrics within UE4 from start to finish. This is useful for vapor/gases close to the ground. There’s a lot of room for improvement and expansion of this technique ranging from clouds in the sky to displaying a terrains height map for a holographic effect.
This method would likely hold up in a production environment, though there is a ton of overdraw. From our initial tests, there seems to be little to no impact on framerate by using this method SPARINGLY. The less layers you use, the more performant the effect is.
An example of this effect using a disc mesh instead of a plane:
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/PeskyInferiorAmazonparrot-size_restricted.gif
Realistic Fireball Projectiles
Our third tutorial series shows how to create realistic fireballs as seen here in one of my promotional videos:
Part 1:
This details the base shader creation, one of the base fire textures (great for fire on the ground and such too), and then the projectiles base motion to go from the spawner to the target of choice with seeking abilities.
Part 2:
This details creating the rest of the VFX portion of this fireball. Smoke, fire trail (ribbon), sparks, leading projectile, etc.
Part 3:
I wish this one was done within part 1 of the video, but alas I didn’t think of it. This just shows how easily add arcing motion to your projectiles and it’s certainly the shortest portion of the series.
So there you go! Creating everything you need for some basic fireball projectiles. I will cover cast effects and impacts in a separate series.
I will note that I probably should have used curve atlases or gradient mapping to colorize my textures consistently rather than colorizing them within photoshop. I chose not to do this for the sake of time, though I’d have to recommend that you colorize your textures with those methods.
I’d love the communities feedback so that I can continue to create great tutorials for more Real-time VFX. More tutorials will be posted here in the future, this is just what I’ve created thus far.
If you like what I’ve posted here, go subscribe to us on youtube!
Cheers!
Nick S.
Founder - https://jangafx.com
