Niagara Fluids Smoke Portal VFX Tutorial in Unreal Engine 5.3 | Real-Time Simulation | RedefineFX

all right how's it going everybody Jesse here with redefine effects and today we'll be creating the smoke portal simulation with Niagra fluids in Unreal Engine so just to show you it's a completely realtime simulation I can freely walk around it so this tutorial is actually just one out of 15 Total videos inside of the free Niagra fluids crash course where we set up multiple more effects completely from scratch so if you like to keep learning V effects in Unreal Engine with make sure you grab the free course at redefine effects.com blast while it's still available and with that let's jump right into it so I'm starting with a blank scene as usual we can just right click make a new Niagra system create an empty system just call it nsor portal double click we need to give birth to some particles so right click add emitter I'll just create an empty emitter hit F2 to rename it as emitter uncore particles let's go under a meta update and create a new spawn rate module and let's give birth to 1,000 particles then under initialized particle we can make them live shorter times to Lifetime three and for the size just set it to uniform and I'll give them a size of three as well next we need these to be born on top of a Taurus so particle spawn again click on the plus sign and just search for location and we need the shape location module here you can change it from sphere to Taurus and I did 125 for the large radius 25 for the handle radius so you're getting something like this but right now it's sitting on the floor and we need it to be standing up so for that just go to the rotation mode and set it to axis angle and right away just with the default settings it's going to be rotated 90° for you like this now we need the particles to spin around so for that we can go to particle update again particle update is what happens to the particles over the course of their lifetime so that's why we're in this group and let's add a force and add the vortex Force it's going to say that it wants the so forces and velocity module in order for it to work so just click fix issue and it's going to show up here and now it's working but it's rotating the wrong way so the vortex axis needs to be one on the X and zero on the Z so now it's rotating correctly so we need to just slow them down with a D drag module so again plus sign just search for drag and add a drag module so it is better but they're still overshooting so we can just lower the vortex force from 200 to 100 and now they're staying relatively contained to the dut shape so that's exactly what we need now one minor Improvement we can do is the particles right now are popping into place and dying very abruptly so we can make them scale up and scale down over time so again under part particle update you can just search for size and use the scale Sprite size module so this controls the size of the particles over time so they begin small and then they die at their full size that's what this graph means I actually want them to start invisible then in the middle so you can right click and add key I want them to be at their full size so I'm moving it all the way to a value of one and at the end of their life I want them to disappear again so I'll just drag this down to zero so as you can see right now the particles are born invisible they slowly scale up and then they slowly scale down as they die and you can do contrl a to select all of the key frames then hit one which will make them smooth key frames so now you have something a bit more elegant so before we add the smoke make sure you save your work so just file save all again Niagra fluids is still in beta and it can crash easily right so now we need to tell Niagara that we want these particles to emit smoke and for that we need to go under particle update again and just search for set and we need the set fluid Source attributes this is letting Niagra know that we want these particles to act as little sources for smoke and fire in our case we just want smoke so I'll set the temperature to zero and the density I ended up doing 0.3 after some back and forth so now we can create our smoke emitter so right click add emitter parent emitters and we want the git 3D gas Master emitter double click and we can just collapse all these settings because all we really care about is the emitter summary if you've watched any of my previous Niagara tutorials I have gone over these settings in detail so you can check those out first thing we need to do is get rid of this sphere emitter and have the smoke be emitted from the particles so I'll just go to source and turn off the sphere source and instead I want to use a particle Source set it to emitter now we need to set our emitter particles to be a GPU particle simulation so just go to properties and change it to a GPU Sim and set the bounds to fixed to get rid of the warning and now if we go back to our gas emitter we can just change the emitter name just start typing Emit and select your emitter particles click away wait for it to update and here you go now the partic are emitting smoke now the grid is too small so under simulation I'll do 800 on the xaxis 1,200 on the Y and 600 on the Z so now we have a much bigger grid to accommodate our portal we also need the portal to be more higher up so that's what the local pivot is for so I just said the x2.2 and the Z 2.2 as well so these are the values that I used previously where the portal is sitting just just right above the ground now right now the smoke is rising up and we don't want that so that's what the density buoyancy does the negative value means that it's going up positive value means that it's going down so I'll set it to a positive value of 0.1 which will make the smoke just slightly heavy and it's going to linger around like this and finally I need the smoke to disappear much sooner that's what the dissipation rate density is for if I raise this value it's remove the smoke faster so I ended up setting this to 0.9 and you'll see now that the smoke is dissipating much much quicker making for a nicer portal now we also need to raise the resolution of the simulation to get some nicer detail so I'll actually set the maximum resolution from 200 to 500 which is quite high I would say be careful going higher than this it can crash and the pressure solve iterations all set to 12 this just helps improve collisions with the floor so you can turn off the spread renderer for your particles so all you see is just the smoke so it doesn't look that great um but the lighting will make a huge difference and also what we can do is push the smoke to the back a little bit to give it more depth so we can go under forces wind and just enable calculate wind and let's increase the wind magnitude to maybe 10 and you see now it's pushing the smoke back make making it look a bit more 3D and and cooler than before and one more thing that we can do is make it collide with the floor right now the smoke is getting killed when it touches the floor so under collisions you can uncheck open boundary minus Z and now the smoke will actually collide with the ground so let's also go under simulation and uncheck draw bounds so we don't see the simulation box and again just a reminder make sure that you're saving your work so file save all let's go go back into our level and I'll just drag my NS portal into the scene move it up so it's sitting just nicely on the ground all right so we're almost there one more thing we can do to improve how this spinning motion looks is with the motion velocity so under the set fluid Source attributes you have this velocity scale this controls how much velocity is transferred from the particles onto the smoke so if I want the particles to contribute more velocity I can just raise this from one to two and it's just going to make the smoke um spin around faster than before and one more thing we can do to improve this is set the radius of the particles to just five and this will create some more subtle Trails behind the particles so it's not so obvious and I think that's looking much nicer now than it was before all right so finally we just need to do something about this nasty lighting so you can just turn off or just delete the direction light Al together then what I like to do is just go under edit project settings and just search for auto exposure and turn off the uto exposure so that the brightness is not changing on its own for you next we can go under create lights and make a new Spotlight make sure right away that you search for cast and enable the cast volumetric Shadows super important to make this look good and at this point I will just switch back to my original scene to show you what I did for the lighting so for the environment it's just a few imported rocks straight from quickel and for the lighting if I zoom out basically I have a few spotlights this one is Illuminating just the Rocks this one is Illuminating the smoke from the back so the back lighting really adds a lot to it right so I have this light here and then I have this Spotlight Illuminating the smoke from the back as well then in the middle I just have this blue point light with a pretty high intensity again this is what that does and I have one more blue light just Illuminating the rocks in the background so you know feel free to change the colors place the lights wherever you would like to make it look cool and one last thing I added to make this look even a touch better are these little particles flying through the smoke so for that you can just copy your emitter particles just do contrl C contrl + V and rename it as particles uncore glowing or something like that you can turn off the set fluid attributes we don't need these particles to emit any smoke and just enable the spread renderer so you can see them right so now you have the particles just flying through the smoke and I'll turn off the smoke for now just so it's faster to deal with this so spawn rate maybe just 200 particles just give them a size of maybe one and you can also give this a range so you can click on this Arrow here and set it to random range float and give them a size anywhere from 0.5 to 1.5 and let's add some curl noise to make them look like fireflies so you can just click on the plus and again just type curl and add the curl noise force and just set this pretty high to maybe 300 that's too much so 150 it's up to you maybe even that's too much so I'll just do 75 and finally you can make them blue so initialize particle color mode you can do random range and just give them a range anywhere from like a bright blue to let's say like a darker blue and that's how you get your particles flying through the smoke easy breezy so as always I hope that you guys found this tutorial helpful if you did I would appreciate a thumbs up definitely check out the free niagar crash course where we cover several more effects from start to finish just like this smoke portal and I go into a lot more detail explaining all of of the settings so if anything in this tutorial wasn't clear definitely check out the free course where I go over everything in even more detail the course is available for free at rofin effects.com blast I would love to see you inside of it and with that thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: RedefineFX

Views: 42,947

Keywords: niagara fluids tutorial, epic games, vfx tutorial, niagara fire, niagara vfx tutorial, unreal engine volume smoke, unreal engine tutorial, game development, cinematic vfx, cgi, visual effects, redefinefx, portal tutorial, smoke portal, vfx artist, rookie awards, fortnite, computer graphics, 3d animation, unreal engine particles, niagara particles tutorial, ue 5 volumetric smoke, unreal engine niagara

Id: nOirmGz8YG4

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024