Niagara Fluids Tutorial: Character on Fire Simulation (Skeletal Mesh) VFX in Unreal Engine 5.3

how's it going everybody Jesse here with readathon effects and today I'll show you how to emit smoke and fire out of your animated character let's jump right into it alright so first you need a character you can download it for miximo miximo characters will work with this technique as well or you can just go to characters mannequins animations let's pick Manny and do mm walk forward make sure that he's in the origin of your scene so X Y and Z should be set to zero and just make sure that the skeletal mesh matches the characters so here it should say Manny instead of Queen so skm Manny simple and then you can just right click Niagara system let's make a new system from template this time and pick the grid 3D gas simple particle Source rename it as NS underscore character fire we can delete these comments here and we can also turn off shape location add velocity curl noise force and scale Sprite size right so if you'd like to learn how to set up these simulations completely from scratch I have tutorials for that on my channel here I just want to show you the character part so under particle spawn you can search for reproduction and we want the initialize mesh reproduction Sprite and our skeletal mesh is called skm Manny simple so here I'll search for skm Manny simple and then under particle update I again want to search for reproduction and I want the update mesh reproduction Sprite and again search for skm many simple and if you turn on your Sprite renderer you can see that your character is already being formed by the particles so the way this works under particle spawn the particles are being told to be born on top of the character on the particle update they're being told to stay attached to the character over the course of their lifetime that's why we added this reproduction Sprite in these two groups so we can turn off the spread renderer and right now what's happening under set fluid Source attributes the radius of the particles is too small so we can just revert this back to default and set it to around 8. and now you can see our character is on fire so now we can just move him down so emitter summary let's do 0.5 on the Z so he's sitting on the ground and at this point we can test that everything is working in our scene so just drag your Niagara system into the scene make sure that it's at the origin so again x y z should be set to zero and they should be lining up right now so now just grab the Niagara system in your outliner and drag it on top of your character skeletal mesh which is the mm walk forward and click on none this way they're linked together and now when you select simulate and start the simulation you can see it there perfectly attached and it's already working right so this is basically the setup you can just improve how the simulation looks from here so we can extend our grid on the y-axis I'll just do 1000 so inside of the templates there are some user parameters set meaning you just control those settings from down here so we can give it maybe a thousand on the y-axis 400 on the X let's just move the character more to this wall so I'll just move him on the y-axis maybe minus 0.3 let's increase the resolution of the simulation so you can set that to 400 and under simulation I don't want the fire to be rising up like this we could just go under forces and enable wind we want the wind to be on the y-axis and give it a magnitude of maybe 50 or actually it should be -1 on the Y right so now it's being pushed back and we can also just give it the gravity on the y-axis so gravity on Z zero and gravity on y we can do a thousand so now if I go back to my scene and I start the simulation we are almost there maybe the fire is Just a Touch Too Bright so for that you can just lower the temperature amount here to maybe 0.25 if you want less smoke you can decrease the density to 0.4 and if you want the character to give less speed to the smoke and disturb it less you can also decrease the velocity scale to 0.5 also don't forget to hide the bounce so uncheck drawbounds and of course I just added some lights and some rocks from quicksole to make the scene a bit more interesting I will leave it up to you to play around with this if you'd like to learn how to set up simulations like this completely from scratch I recently released the completely free Niagara fluids crash course where we set up all of these effects that you're seeing completely from scratch I go over all of the settings in a lot more detail it's completely free and you can still get it at redefinefx.com blast so make sure you grab it it's not gonna be around forever and with that thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: RedefineFX

Views: 41,883

Keywords: niagara fluids, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine vfx, vfx tutorial, redefinefx, jesse pitela, visual effects, 3d animation, computer graphics, smoke simulation, fire simulation, smoke character, mesh on fire, unreal engine fluids

Id: HFmmFngx14U

Length: 5min 36sec (336 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023