Stylised fire vfx
For "The Last Shanty" I have created various Stylised VFX to make the environment feel alive and interactive
one of them being a Stylised fire pit and 2 different variations of torch VFX
Substance Graph and the Overview
Starting off for this fire VFX I went ahead and created 2 texture variations of fire inside of Substance Designer. The process of creating these was pretty straight forward. I used simple shapes to subtract one from another to get this fire look. I then used a warp node with a perlin noise to breakup the shape even more and make it fire like. In the end I used the bevel node to get the second and 3rd shape inside which I then coloured with a gradient map to get that fire look.
For embers I used a tile sampler to get the shape and then by simply blending 4 different variations to make a flipbook
Fire Master Material
Fire Master Material is a quiet a simple setup however it gave me a really pleasing result. Using an earlier created Distortion Function which I used in other shaders through the project I was able to give the fire texture a good looking flicker effect. I also multiplied particle colour and emissive strength just for a little more user control inside of Niagara System, incase I ever needed these parameters
Distortion Function
Refraction for Heatwaves
Distortion Function is a noise texture with it being panned in any direction. I have exposed parameters like the Scale (U,V) of the texture, the speed and the direction (X,Y), distortion strength and distortion offset. By adding the function and fire texture it gives me the right effect
For refraction the setup is pretty similar as the main Fire shader the only thing different is how I had to add a vector 3 (0,0,1) to the normal input because otherwise the shader wouldn't show up in the Niagara System.
Niagara Graph Breakdown
Niagara System Graph
Niagara setup is straight forward. For fire I just have an infinite particle with the Fire Material Instance. Regarding smoke, it is more complex and I will break it down individually.
Embers is a flipbook with 4 different ember variations. Using an Add Velocity node and setting it to "In Cone" I can get a burst like effect going from the center of the fire. Adding some curl noise and scale mesh size I am able to break up the repetition of constantly looping particles. For the distortion I am using a larger scale fire with a distortion shader which gave me the desired heatwave effect.
Torch fire
This effect I am quiet happy with because I didn't expect it to turn out this well. I created a custom mesh within maya which follows the shape of the torch. After that I made a shader using the Noise node unreal provides, even though it is a little more expensive than just using a custom noise texture, but I was willing to sacrifice some performance. I then used that custom generated noise and multiplied it with "VertexNormalWS" to get correct displacement and that was plugged in to WPO. Regarding the shading I used a Fresnel node as alpha input for the Lerp node where both A and B inputs were 2 different colours.