5 Steps to Creating a Niagara Storm in Unreal Engine

hello and welcome in this video we're going to be covering my five steps to creating a desert Sandstorm in Unreal Engine 5 and at the end of the video I'm going to be sharing the biggest mistake I see people make when building their own environment effects and just environments in general the most important word is layers complicated effects like this desert Sandstorm can be much more manageable when divided into separate little pieces which when layered together greatly finished effect in our case we're just going to build it from the ground up quite literally we're going to be starting with the ground step number one create a moving sand decal for the ground inside of Unreal Engine I have this decal which I can place into my environment this decal gives the effect that the sand on the ground is moving blown by the wind I can create this very easily by just taking a decal of the sand and taking a second neural map like this wave normal map and using what's called a Panner that Panner node is going to take the normal map that you give it and move it in a particular direction over time so I'm using this Panner node here to create the effect of the sand being blown along the ground and I'm going to place a few of them here to give the effect that the sand around here is all moving alright that looks pretty good you can place as many of these around your environment as you need to give the correct effect step number two is Pebbles blowing along the ground as we're building up this effect we're gonna have different levels of particulates blowing through our environment and the first one is going to be small rocks or Pebbles so I'm gonna drag in my Niagara emitter that I built this Niagara emitter is going to be blowing little pieces of geometry that look like pebbles across the scene if I open up the Niagara emitter real quick it is using a simple mesh render here with Collision turned on so it bounces along the ground I'm in this case using a wind Force to blow it along the ground and I usually like to place it just out of frame so you can see the Pebbles rolling in front of the camera along the ground in the foreground step number three is going to be billowing clouds moving along the surface of the landscape so now we're building up in layer here so I'm going to drag another Niagara emitter in here and this one I started with the smoke preset inside of Unreal Engine and I just modified it to look a little bit more like sand which means honestly just tweaking the color to be brown one important thing that I did change about this material though is that I added what's called a depth fade node and the depth fade helps me blend the Sprites that are being emitted with the ground itself so you'll notice here as the Sprites interact with the ground here they're just kind of smoothly blending in as opposed to creating harsh lines so I usually move this emitter quite a bit out of frame it kind of expands as it leads the emitter so I want it to expand into a large area before it passes camera and I will probably place a few of these as well it's usually a good idea to space them out having one in the foreground having one in the mid ground and finally having one in the background I will often also adjust the transparency of the particles themselves as well to make sure they're not too opaque sometimes it's better to build up a bunch of layers of more transparent particles give more of a feeling of depth to the storm step number four is gonna be your lighting it's not gonna look like you're inside of a massive Sandstorm if the lighting doesn't also match first thing that we're going to do is tint our actual Sun color to make it seem as though it's scattering through fog you can also just add a lot more fog to your scene so that the light will scatter through in the color of that fog it's up to you how you want to approach it I'm going to lower the saturation a little bit as well step number five is gonna be our camera animation having our camera shake a little bit as if it's being blown by the wind it's gonna help sell the effect that we're in a storm and we're being buffeted by the sand blowing against us so this can easily be achieved by adding a camera Shake blueprint to your camera and sequencer so in my content browser I'm going to right click and make a blueprint class in the blueprint class I'm going to expand all classes and in all classes I'm going to search camera Shake I'm going to choose camera Shake base here and I will call it BP underscore camera shake when I open up that blueprint this is what I'm gonna see and what I want to do is say save it close it and reopen when I reopen it it will look slightly different what I want to do is come to the root Shake pattern here and choose purlin noise camera Shake I'm going to expand the rotation Tab and what I want to do is just increase the amplitude of the shake a little bit so I'll make it one and I want to choose the frequency of the camera shake so how quickly it's moving from side to side and I'm going to up the frequency multiplier to two another thing we have to make sure we do is come down to timing change the duration to zero which is going to have it just play continuously compile and save I can close that now I'm going to come down to my camera actor here and choose the plus track button choose camera shake and I can see the blueprint that I've just made I'm going to add that blueprint and now if I hit play here it's going to shake the camera as if it's getting blown by the wind and that's it we have a pretty convincing looking storm effect which brings me to my number one mistake that people make when building their own environment effects and just environments in general and that is to not have reference where reference is the single most important thing that you can do when you're first starting a shot or a project whatever it is I used reference in this case to identify these five steps if I didn't look at the reference first I wouldn't have seen the sand was moving on the ground there was a layer of Pebbles being blown across the billowing clouds and Camera shape these are all things identified while analyzing my reference sometimes when you approach these effects they can seem very complicated but if you choose the right reference and you study it you can start to pick out these individual layers and pieces that when added together are greater than the sum of their parts if you found this video helpful let me know by hitting the Subscribe button if you'd like to learn more about Unreal Engine as a filmmaking tool I have a free training which I built which you can find in the description below good luck and see you in the next one

Channel: Aziel Arts

Views: 17,099

Keywords: unreal engine storm, unreal engine storm tutorial, unreal engine sand storm, unreal engine dust storm, unreal engine 5 storm tutorial, unreal engine 5 sand storm, unreal engine 5 storm clouds, unreal engine stormwind, unreal engine storm clouds

Id: XzT3zvco5HY

Length: 5min 47sec (347 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022