Niagara Fluids Beginner Tutorial: Cryogenic Smoke VFX in Unreal Engine 5.3 | RedefineFX

all right how's it going everybody Jesse here with really fun effects and in today's tutorial I'll show you how to create this volumetric smoke with Niagara fluids in Unreal Engine 5.3 this is a completely volumetric simulation taking place in real time I can freely walk around the smoke so this will be a beginner friendly tutorial that you can follow along with even if you're completely new to Niagara two important things you need to be running Unreal Engine 5.3 and you need to go under edit plugins and just search Niagara and make sure you enable the Niagara fluids plugin so I'm starting with a blank scene I just imported these two characters from miximo and we can right click and create a new Niagara system just say create an empty system finish and let's call it NS underscore smoke double click so inside of Niagara I like to have my simulations against a black background you can do that simply by going under window preview scene settings and you can uncheck show environment and then set the environment color to Black so you have a black background like me and we can just right click in here and make a new emitter then click on parent emitters and select the grid 3D gas Master emitter double click it may take a few seconds to compile and you should start seeing this in your viewport it's just the basic fluid simulation of smoke now don't be intimidated by all of these settings we can actually collapse this emitter with this Arrow here because epic games has provided us with this emitter summary which contains majority of the main settings you will ever need to control your simulation so let's go back into our level and just drag the Niagara simulation into our scene to see how big it actually is we need the smoke to collide with our monster over here so I'll select the monster and just search for tag and then click on this Arrow here under the actor category and just type in collider so now we have tagged this geometry and it's letting Niagara know that we want this object to be a collider for the simulation so now when I move the smoke over you can see that it's already beautifully colliding with our monster so there's a few things we need to do number one we need a bigger simulation grid and we need the smoke to be heavy and falling down so back in our settings over here we can go into the simulation Tab and here you have World size that actually controls the size of the grid so let's extend it on the x-axis maybe I'll set this to 800. I also wanted to be taller so I'll set the z-axis to 1200 and on the y-axis maybe it can be 600 so we have a much bigger grid overall next we have the sphere on the bottom but we need it to be on top for the smoke to be falling down so for that we can use this local pivot setting so you see that as I set the z-axis here to zero it actually raises the origin of the simulation up minus 0.3 and that actually moves the sphere all the way to the ceiling and now we need to tell the smoke to fall down and for that we can use this density buoyancy so density here basically means smoke and buoyancy means whether it's going up or down so negative buoyancy here actually means that it's going up so positive buoyancy will make it fall down so I'll set the density buoyancy to 0.5 and now we're getting some beautiful heavy smoke falling down now the next issue is that the smoke dies as soon as it touches the bottom of the Grid it's immediately killed and that is controlled in the collisions tab so here we have the boundary category and you can see open boundary minus Z so minus Z is the floor plus Z is the ceiling then you know plus x minus X are the are the sides so these are basically the walls of the grid so I'll just uncheck open boundary minus Z and this way I'm telling Niagara that I want the bottom of the grid to act as a solid wall so now as you'll see you can extend your timeline over here to maybe 20 seconds extend this out and the smoke is beautifully colliding with the floor of the grid so back in our level we can now move our Niagara system above the monster sort of put it behind the neck I think you get the kind of look that I'm going for it's as if the monster has been frozen and there's that freezer um smoke that cryogenic smoke just falling down around it so this is not a bad start but we just need to improve the quality of this so number one I think the smoke could be falling down even faster so simulation density buoyancy let's set that to one to speed it up even more we also want the collisions to be better so in order for us to improve the collisions we can just increase the pressure solve iterations from 6 to 15 and you should immediately see a difference here in how the smoke is going around the monster right we're getting some much nicer collisions and behavior in the smoke and what we can also do is raise the resolution of the simulation so this is done with the resolution Max axis right now it's set to 200 I'm going to set it to 400 which is double the resolution and now you can see how much more detail we're getting in the smoke some beautiful detail over here and finally what I would like to do is for the smoke to live longer you see that the smoke dissipates before it really touches the floor and I want it to stay alive longer so that's controlled with this dissipation rate density this means dissipation for the smoke so the higher this value the faster the smoke dissipates so if I want the smoke to stay alive longer I need to lower this value so I'll set it to just 0.1 and now you can see that the smoke stays alive for much longer it actually hits the floor and spreads around the floor so that's perfect now don't forget to keep saving your work this is still in beta and it has crashed on me many times so make sure you just go to file and save all now let's make sure that the grid is sitting perfectly on the floor so I'll just move this up until the bottom of the grid is right on the floor and let's just extend the grid even more so there's more room around the monster so World size on the X I'll actually just set to 1500 and let's do a thousand on the y-axis and then you can uncheck draw bounds and this will actually hide the grid completely so I want both the monster and the soldier here to move and for that I'm gonna create a new sequencer so just click here and add level sequence I'll just call it SQ underscore monster smoke and you can just select the mutant over here and drag him into the sequencer click on the plus sign in the animation Tab and select the animation for him and I'll do the same thing for the night so drag the Knight over here click on the animation and select his idle animation again I got these from mixamo you can extend the timeline here to maybe 700 frames and select the animation and just extend the animation it's going to keep looping for you and now when I hit play the monster is moving and moving the smoke around nicely just like I had in my original example and the Knight is like breathing and getting ready to fight as well so I'm not gonna spend too much time setting up the lighting I mainly just wanted to show you the Niagara portion of this but what I did is I just deleted the directional light completely and then you can just go under create lights and make a new Spotlight you can increase the intensity of the light and increase the cone angle so it lights up a bigger area now one important step when it comes to lighting up the volumetric simulations is that you need to search for cast under your light settings and make sure you enable the cast volumetric Shadows so watch here it's disabled and now when I enable it I'm getting beautiful volumetric Shadows from the light Illuminating the smoke so now what I did was I just hold alt and make a few of these lights what I like to do is put the lights behind the smoke and just sort of light them up from behind and you can give them those blue and red colors if you want to make it look cooler so maybe this one can be slightly blue and this one can be that sort of alarm going off red color so I just switch back to my original scene to show you that all I did here was I basically um just spread out a bunch of these spotlights a few blue ones a few red ones you know one white in the front just Illuminating everything and then I just added a few pillars to add some sense of scale and depth to the scene so this tutorial is one of 12 Total videos inside of the free Niagara crash course that I released a few days ago there are over three more complete effect setups that we create from scratch while learning a lot of other Niagara techniques and particles Sparks fire smoke so if you like to keep learning Niagara with me make sure you grab it at redefinefx.com blast make sure you get it before it's gone it's not gonna be available for free forever please let me know in the comments if you'd like me to keep making more Niagara tutorials like this if you found the tutorial helpful as always I would appreciate a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: RedefineFX

Views: 73,119

Keywords: niagara vfx, unreal engine vfx, unreal engine 5.3, niagara fluids, niagara smoke, unreal engine niagara, real time smoke, volumetric smoke, 3d smoke, volume fog, redefinefx, vfx tutorial, epic games, unreal engine vfx tutorial, 3d animation, visual effects, smoke simulation

Id: A8-hGmgSXwI

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2023