Unreal Engine 5 - Stylized Smoke VFX - Niagara Tutorial

today let's see how to create stylized smoke in unreal this is one of the most useful tricks to know when it comes to visual effects knowing how tooll meshes can yield some pretty cool results especially when trying to recreate stylized effects so let's see a simplified version as usual be made quite a few variations and they are all available on the marketplace and on my patreon page 2 links below so without further Ado let's jump right into this just want to say these videos are possible thanks M patrons and by supporting me you get access to these projects and many many more assets that you can use in your games so for this one we can begin with an nagra system directly an empty one and rename it to stz it smoke and inside here with right click we can add an empty meter this is going to be for our smoke this way you see how to set up an Emer from scratch as well the first thing we need is to change the render we are not going to emit Sprites we are going to emit a mesh render because we want to emit a specific mesh for this effect that we will show you in a moment how to create for now let's get the basic motion of this Emer right then what we need is to Spa something right so on the meter update we can add the spawn rate of around 20 and say the lifetime in the initialized particle is random between 1.2 and 1.6 we can already say that the scale is going to be something between 1 and two we will see later on if that's okay let's just add a shape location so they don't all spawn in the same position it can be a cinder with no eigh but with a radius of 20 small thing finally some motion with ADD velocity this gives us a warning essentially saying that we are missing the S Forces and velocity and we can click fix issue and on real will automatically add it oh let's say the velocity is in cone around 800 and if we want this to go up we can say the cone axis is 0 0 for the X and Y and one for the Z and then you can play a little bit with the cone angle so it spreads this is what we got as you can see some basic axis 3D models but the motion is more or less there now let's take care of the aspect of this and let's create a very basic mesh we are going to use blender because it's easy to pick up and it's free and I'm going to guide you the best that I can for example we want to select everything with a and then press delete so we can have a clean scene and then with shift a we want to start with an iOS sphere and down here on the left bottom panel we want to set the subdivisions to one because they will look better if we add a modifier right here called subdivision C surface just like this now the idea is to duplicate this a couple of times two three times four so we kind of have this Cloud this smoke this shape you can test different shapes obviously it's totally fine the idea then is to select these meshes and with contrl J we are going to join them into one mesh now this has a lot of vertic inside there that we don't need so let's use a remesh modifier and with voxel selected let's say the voxel size is around 05 oh and turn on smooth shading so it looks smoother feel free to test different voxel size values and lastly we want to apply these modifiers from the top the subdivision and then the remesh and with all of these applied now we can use decimate to decrease the poly count I'm going to use UNS subdivide and increase a little bit the iterations you can play with these values and adjust it however you want and then we need to apply this now for this to work properly with our Shader we need to fix the UVS I'm going to open up a new window and select UV editor and on the right window with tab we can enter edit mode and as you can see this doesn't have UV Maps so one very simple way to unwrap this and get a decent UV map is by pressing U and select sphere projection now we need to make sure that everything is inside this boundary this Square we can scale it down with s select the vertex that are outside the boundaries with b and push them inside with G they won't be perfect but they're acceptable UVS for this effect now let's rename this to smoke 01 and let's export these in file export and select fbx turn on select the object so we only export this we rame it to SCM and thecore smoke and in our case we are going to export this Direct ly to the unreal project as soon as we switch over to Unreal it has detected that there's a new file it asks us if we want to import and we can say import all close this window and now let's assign this right here so we can see something and here we go that's the beginning looks very interesting already now let's make sure that it has some random Rotation by adding the initial mesh orientation module to the particle spound make sure mesh orientation mode is set to random and finally we can control the scale of this with a scale mesh size on the partic plate let's transform this into a float and then transform it to a curve and we want this to essentially grow so the first key is going to be 0.1 more less and the last key 1.5 for example I'm going to use alutto so it's a little bit smoother and fix the handles so we can have this curve right here and this is what we get at this point right so we need need to take care of the aspect of this let's go ahead and create a material with right click material I'm going to call it the M uncore smoke double click to open it up and on the details let's already switch the material to masked so we can essentially erode this and that's the foundation on how we made all of these effects which are all available on the marketplace by the way now we essentially need a texture to eroll this according to that texture so let's search for a parameter 2D call it the main text and to aoll that texture we can connect the RGB to a power node now if we want the colors of Niagara to influence this material we need the particle color node multiply it with the power and connected to the emissive color now there's one thing we need which is to control that power value how much we dissolve the main text through Niagara for that we use a dynamic parameter node it comes with four parameters we can rename the first one to erosion and the second one to power and the default values could be 20 and zero we can connect the power to the power node and the erosion parap is a cool trick that we can multiply with the r channel of the main text and then connect to the opacity mask this is what will erode the power is to dissolve the texture in combination you can create very interesting effects I'm just going to assign the vono to the main texture which by the way it's available for free on the link below and this is what we have lastly if you guys want to control the metallic and specular values you can create a scalar parameter for the metallic and for the specular with default values of 0 and 0.1 respectively let's save this and as a good practice let's create a material instance out of this original material I'm going to drag it outside of The Originals it's just good practice let's go back to our Niagara system and on the mesh render let's enable material override add a new material override and well assign the material instance of the smoke and here we go it's a beginning now the cool trick is to animate the erosion and if you want to animate something it needs to be in the particle plate where we can use the dynamic material parameters so we can access the those values that we have Exposed on the material and as you can see Niagra immediately detects that there is an erosion and a power parameter for the erosion let's convert this float to a curve and the way this works is well in the beginning let's say the first key starts at 0.3 and it has a value of 15 and last key we can leave it as it is let's select everything and say it's Alo so we can have these handles and create this curve right here what will happen is that 15 needs no erosion and zero is completely eroded so in the beginning we don't have erosion and at the end well it's eroded creating this cool effect and now you can do all type of things for example let's use a scale color say it's rgba together and convert this to a curve and it will create a gradient and the cool thing is that we can push the last key more or less around here as well as the first key to around 025 add a key in the middle we can say it as this value in terms of gray and for the last key a very close dark and we create this very cool stylized smoke just look how awesome it is and now if you want to control these as if it was a wind you can add a wind force in the partic update we get a warning saying that there's a few moduls that are missing like the drag module we can click fix issue there's another warning on the drag saying that it needs the drag to be before solve forces and velocity can click fix ISS isue and NRA automatically fix this which is awesome and now well on the wind speed we could say something like 1,500 for the X and for the Z as well and we prefer to disable turbulance we get a more realistic feeling and this is what we get so as you can see you can control the wind force can play with these and it's super cool the effect we can get just the erosion now it would be super awesome if you guys could support us on Patron where you can get all of these effects from this pack and many many more assets that you can use that would be awesome and we would appreciate a lot if you guys could support us this is also available on the marketplace by the way I want to say thank you to each Patron that supported last month and a quick sh out goes to the top tier patrons which are Alberto Sager alexe alien ala avat to Bali cyber cradle Daniel Schmid David Molina di Mar Lu am Frosty 40 grub lab Jared Billy Jonathan Carlson Casey Miller Lee and Al m mat moow Mike Bell M SDA orrion Pier Mario prip radioactive bu Revenant games rvr Shen agular Spence Stan Mar Will MIM and Sano so thank you all very much I hope you are enjoying this unreal enant tutorial series with Niagara and I hope to see you on the next one thank you bye know

Channel: Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Views: 9,474

Keywords: unreal engine, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine 5, niagara, unreal engine particle effects, niagara tutorial, game effect tutorial, Game Effects Tutorial, vfx, tutorial, unreal engine effects, unreal engine magic effects, unreal engine niagara, unreal engine vfx, visual effects, ue vfx, ue5, niagara effect, ue stylized, stylized art, ue, smoke shader, smoke, smoke niagara, smoke material, ue5 smoke, unreal engine smoke, stylized smoke, smoke tutorial, ue smoke, particles

Id: HRagD5L-WF8

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024