How to Make Elden Ring-Inspired Beam VFX in Unreal Engine! | Level Up - VFX Breakdown | Beyond-FX

so I heard you wanted to make a beam effect in unreal for this tutorial you're already going to need to know a little bit about Niagara and how it works I'm not going to be setting everything up step by step I'm mainly going to be going through this effect and explaining how I created different parts of it and how it all meshes [Music] together hi my name is Ben Christensen I'm a VFX artist at Beyond effects and today I'm going to show you how I created this beam within Niagara and unreal let's go let's make some magic that charges up our beam before the final attack so what you're going to do is you want to make sure that you have your ribbon's leader with a spawn rate that way we want to speed up the amount of magic that's shooting towards the center I have mine going to 5 to 30 then I have a shape location because we don't want all these guys spawning directly in the center we want them to spawn around and then shoot towards the center to charge it up I have some curl noise at the very beginning of they spawn that way we get some curl you can see some of them kind of fly around before flying into the center and then from my point attraction Force I have it going from 0 to 5,000 that way these start to shoot towards the center faster and faster over time and then for my ribbon which is the only thing you can actually see in here the trail leader doesn't actually matter I have it scale set to zero I have its color set to these two colors just to get a bit of randomization to set up this refraction sphere that just adds to the charge effect what you're going to do is you're going to create a mesh renderer and you're going to put a sphere and then you need to create a material for the material I just used the startup texture for water and I have particle color and a Fel in order for this outside glow and then I have a dynamic parameter for the amount of refraction and the opacity after that just put that in here and make sure that you have your Dynamic material parameters I'm going to have it fade in so my refraction goes from 1 to two and the opacity goes from 0 to 1 over5 seconds and then I also have update mesh orientation so we got some spin on it and I have a scale mesh size so that we are scaling this guy downward over time to add to the charge let's make the core of our beam which is just a sphere with a geometry from the starter content I have this sphere glow material which I'll show you right here it is a simple fornel and color and then I'm controlling the exponent in and the emissive inside the Niagara parameter I have it's starting at 500 so it starts out glowing a lot and then it cools down a bit and then for the exponent I have it here at 50 and then goes down to four and then for the scale mesh size I'm doing all of this manually with this curve let's create some magic to come off main effect of the beam what we're going to do here is under Sprite render make sure you have custom facing alignment custom facing vector and we're going to create a material called refraction refraction is going to use again some refraction so water texture into the normals and I'm going to use this radial gradient exponential to just keep a rounded shape and then I have some panning tiled noise texture here with particle color so inside here what we're going to do is use that Dynamic parameters to scale out that density scale out that opacity set your Sprite facing an alignment to this so that it's always facing the correct direction have a spawn rate of three some randomized size and some randomized rotation so every time this fires off it looks a little bit different like energy is coming out in different directions as we're charging up this effect once you've got that set up we need to make two things we need to duplicate it once so that we get this spawning energy that's a bit bigger after the beam fires and one that only spawns once this larger energy emission that happens as soon as the beam appears so for the one that is a bit faster just set that spawn rate to five and increase the size for the second one I want you to increase the size make sure you have your spawn rate set to instantaneous so that this is only firing once to give you this effect and make sure in your emitter State you have your Loop delays set accurately for when the beam uh has occurred now let's make the beam you want to make sure that you have a beam emitter setup and you have it set to how far you want this guy to go and how fast you want to make sure you have spawn Beam Beam width and I have a scale beam width and particle update that way I can key frame the actual mesh here as it scales down next under ribbon render you want to be able to offset your UV so that you can make sure that you always have the glowing part on the top and bottom and the void part in the direct Center if we look at my material I simply am using component Mass to get this glow at the top and the bottom and in the core and then I also have a Starry Sky texture and a smoky noise texture that I'm panning from left to right that way it looks like energy is coarsing down the beam as it shoots off next is kind of an optional choice for the beam I wanted to hide the connection between this beam and the core here so what I did is I used the starter content Taurus along with the sphere glow material that we used earlier I updated mesh orientation and changed the scale of the Taurus over time so that it kind of slides over the core here to hide that connection if you want to make some magic that flies around our beam as we fire it off then I got you make sure that for your Ribbon Trails leader that you have them spawning in a Taurus so they're not all spawning directly in the center you want to add some velocity so they're all headed the right direction and you want to make sure that their emitter state is set to multiple that way you don't have a constant spawn rate you want them to fire off intermittently you also want to have a Vortex Force so you get some more interesting movement they're all not flying they kind of warp around with this Vortex Force make sure that you also have origin pull that way they don't fly out in random directions for the actual ribbons themselves I just have them starting at zero for their width that way they kind of have a poiner head to them and then I have at 0.1 they're set to one and then at 0.9 seconds they're set to zero with their color I use the same as I did before for the ribbons that charge the actual beam so then all together you have all of these ribbons flying out around our to give a more magical look to our beam effect once all that's set up congratulations you've created a beam and unreal if you'd like me to set up an explosion for when this hits an object or maybe set up how this can be used by a character inside of unreal please leave me a comment below [Music] thanks

Channel: Beyond-FX

Views: 3,529

Keywords: beyond-fx, beyond, fx, behind the scenes, bts, making of, video game behind the scenes, realtime vfx, realtime, vfx, visual effects, effect, effects reel, video game effects, real-time effect, real-time effects, real-time vfx, real time effect, real time effects, real time vfx, vfx how to, vfx breakdown, vfx tutorial, real-time vfx how to, real-time vfx tutorial, real-time vfx breakdown, beam effect, beam vfx, unreal engine, unreal engine 5, ue5, unreal engine 4, ue4

Id: DzXK1KikWms

Length: 6min 25sec (385 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2023