Unreal Engine Magic: showcase

I love mastering magic in Unreal Engine and Houdini. Actually, I think fantasy is my favourite setting and I often get an inspiration of various games and cinema with magicians and dragons. Perhaps, this is because I am a medievalist according to my diploma. Anyway, stories about magic always took my attention and I enjoy creating magical effects in graphics.

Here is a final result of my magic effect, inspired by Elden Ring.

Elden Ring in contrast to Dark Souls was very bright, very shiny in my opinion and I liked magic spells in that game. Indeed, in Elden Ring lore magic plays a much more important role than in Dark Souls, remembering a wonderful location Academy of Raya Lucaria. Certainly, for my project  I wanted to create something on the basis of Elden Ring references, especially the Comet Azur and various magic rains. 

My references with gathering energy into an orb and various moving trails.

Then I started my work with Unreal Engine and Houdini. 

First of all, I created a sphere material and emitter. For this element material should have a dynamic parameter with glowing effect. 

Next step I created rays of energy, using a fbx mesh and two kinds of materials: pseudo fluid and starlike materials. Real Niagara fluids or VBDs are not necessary for this effect and consume enormous resources. I do like Houdini Pyro for making high quality TextureSheets. However in this project I decided to test FluidNinja tool, which has Houdini Pyro templates and allows to create animated sheets and ready to use materials inside Unreal. I was very satisfied by the results. 

In the end, I got this beautiful effect by combining all elements. 

All emitters together.

A starlike material is very simple and contains two textures, one was created in Substance Designer and another is just a picture of stars I liked. Then I added some additional elements like a flash and an effect for space distortion in the moment of explosion. 

Finally, I decided to add more fluidity, something like magic fog before the explosion that give an impression of the eve of great energy. 

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For the trails I used material created in FluidNinja Tool that gave me a very nice ghosty effect. In total there are three emitters which are combined into one big trail. 

For the impact effect I used a particle FX I created in Houdini. I wanted to add something like waver of particles remaining after a hit. 

A similar particle effect I used also for a vortex effect in order to get more fluidity. 

I enjoyed a process of creating this effect and advancing my skills. Hope to make more magic in the future.