Creating Stylized VFX in Unreal Engine 4 [BEGINNERS GUIDE]

[Music] hi everyone my name is pavel and i am vfx artist working in games i also do a lot of personal projects and those are special effects with use of houdini and unreal engine i also do breakdowns of my special effects on my art station and the youtube channel as well recently i've been doing a lot of projectiles and in this video i wanted to show you actually some of the melee attacks and i've created a combo which consists of simple melee attack a bath and a special attack so hopefully you will enjoy it most of the time for my personal project i work using unreal engine and also i like to add some of the houdini simulation to it so in this video i would like to walk you through how i've created these effects and share with you some ideas and my thinking behind it and the task i gave myself was to develop a single melee attack a buff and a special attack for this character something that would fit into hack and slash or rpg fantasy game as a first step i like to explore the skeleton that i'll be working with and so i can create sockets basically to attach my particle systems to during the animation [Music] so for this character i've created this ball socket and i've located it in the center of this weapon as a next step i like to create the whole sequence before i start making special effects so i'm unreal engine got this amazing tool called montage and it allows you to chain few animations together into one single sequence so as you can see in this part um i'm just scrolling through and i've added a default attack here then it goes to raw swing start swing and swing and essentially and then it goes back to the idle i've also placed couple particle systems and i timed them to the animation so as you can see the character is about to swing his weapon and i wanted the trails of sparks to start at this time and [Music] i also put them into the ball socket which i showed you before and we'll discuss all those particle system and i'll show you later in this video and the same thing i've done to the bath however i did attached it to a different socket once i'm happy with the animation setup i like to take a break uh from unreal engine and i usually go to photoshop and upgrade some textures for the um attack but this time i just went to the houdini and i've created this fracture sequence for the final attack as the character smashes his maze to the ground i thought it would be cool if the ground would break into pieces also i think you would add a bit more details and made the attack a bit more epic and just pleasant to look at the rigid body setup is relatively simple and i have detailed tutorial on the subject how to do a similar setup on my youtube channel basically you create a rigid body simulation in houdini and you export it as an animation to unreal engine okay so now i've got animation sequence ready and the ground fracture as well i just went and i've created simple simple blueprint so basically when you press a b button on your keyboard it does the the whole sequence this one montage i showed before and i want to talk about first this effect which is a weapon swing so basically what is is the four particle systems the first one is the trail that travels across the plane which i've made in 3ds max basically what i've done i've imported the character animation and i traced um this plane basically and created a cross plane so it's visible from all the angles and as you can see it's a soft texture that goes from one point one end to another [Music] the second particle system is the hard edge trail basically and it's there to just create this nicer bloom when the mace is traveling another it's a hit effect it doesn't necessarily need to be there i don't i imagine you can basically separate it and implement it in in the game when the weapon actually hits the object but i think it adds a nice hit effect to the character and also grabs player attention just to let him know that he's about to get hit and the last one is a simple lens flare basically to create nice bloom um surrounding the the hit effect and actually the weapon swing itself another effect that it's attached actually to the weapon socket using montage sequence is this effect and what it does it spawns particle systems um for the duration of the swing so as you can see these are the simple sparks and i've got the fire as well which serves the purpose of being a larger sparks but with a bit more um texture definition and shape as well um you can see i've got this hit effect as well that it's coming off there and a mace so it seems like it's a it's glowing and also i've got a lens flare there just to create this flash effect okay so after the weapon swing we've got this uh buff effect and it's there to show the player that he's about to get hit with this powerful attack as you can see the the whole color character glows and it spawns a bunch of sparks and this fire effect as well so it's a simple system and i'm reusing my sparks i've got this fire effect and it's being spawned in the center of character head so those are basically two emitters i'm not using light and i'm not using those two i just duplicated the previous system that i've got for the weapon swing and disable those and also i just changed couple parameters on the dust and the fire okay so now he have his weapon swing he buff himself and now it's time for his special attack which is this ground fracture with a glowing spikes coming off the ground basically so what i've done i've imported the the fracture and i'm timed it in the blueprint which i'm going to show you later but i've created this um effect and it's fairly simple it's just a a simple plane with some geometry and what i'm doing actually i'm masking this area and i'm moving a texture with the noise on top of it and intensity as well over time so what's happening starting from nothing as you can see the texture animates and it's moving towards the the target i was just moving forward really and you control the intensity of it in the blueprint using timeline and i also got sparks as well and basically they just happening when those spikes are actually coming from the ground it's just there to add details to the effect overall i want to mention as well about this dose effect on his weapon when he does this his buff and now he swing his weapon so right before his final attack there are sparks and there's a fire and the character glow itself just before the final attack and all those particle systems i've used for the weapon swing and i've just timed them and attached them using the the montage that i showed you in the beginning of the video most of the characters i'm using across all my vfx i'm actually either buying them from unreal marketplace or just elsewhere and to be honest i've got this pack from a bit gem company and they make those amazing hand-painted style characters which i find very useful especially for stylizer effects that i'm making and just want to talk briefly about this material for the character to make that makes him glow and i've got this uh fresnel of fresnel power and i've made the material and it's basically a parameter that i'm tweaking um inside of blueprint using timeline which i'm gonna show you next and basically the default value is point three which that just makes the character glow just a bit uh and i'm increasing especially during his uh buff sequence i've also masked marked out the the mace's weapon and i made it glow and animate over time using a simple noise texture okay and finally i want to show you the blueprint i've made for this character and so basically when you press a b button it resets the animation back to zero so it always starts from the beginning um and it starts playing the montage as well the whole sequence of the animations after slight delay there's a mace slash effect that it's happening in place and just to indicate he's about to swing his weapon and then goes to the timeline and actually the timeline does the heavy lift lifting so basically what it does you can see that i'm tweaking a bunch of parameters um on for the character material and also for the other materials as well and i'm increasing them over time and just manipulating them through the timeline so in timeline what you can do simply is that you add a float track vector or event track it depends what you really need and you've got this ability to manipulate your parameters over time so as you can see here for example um i can tweak the opacity so it goes from 0 to 1 across 8 seconds same with the noise power and also you can add those nice animation curves to make the effect a bit more snappy and a little bit more suitable for what you're trying to achieve so that's the whole breakdown of this effect i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you find it something useful there and maybe it will inspire you to make your own effect and implement some of the techniques i use in your effect i would love to see them so if you make something uh please let me know tweet at me or maybe send me a message on art station i also want to thank you stylize station for allowing me to actually create a breakdown for you guys because i just i hope there will be a more vfx artist in the industry in the future [Music] you

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 111,106

Keywords: game development, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine, game dev, unreal engine vfx, unreal engine vfx tutorial, ue4 vfx tutorial, ue4 niagara vfx, unreal engine vfx course, game fx, how to, unreal engine vfx reel, ue4 stylized vfx, unreal engine niagara tutorial, vfx tutorial, game vfx, unreal engine 4 vfx, ue4 vfx

Id: iYsc0UX-Gcw

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020