An orbital laser VFX Created in Unreal Engine 5, using Niagara and Blueprints to animate the various laser beams. Animated textures rendered and simulated in Houdini.
This effect consists of 3 major parts:
1. The main laser Niagara system
2. Individual "Buildup ray" Niagara systems
3. Blueprint actor that spawns and animates the Niagara systems above.
The blueprint actor allows for some art direction in terms of spawn timing and animation speeds with instance-editable variables and custom curves.
Breakdown of the main laser system with different elements separated in time.
Part of the Houdini FX setup used to simulate and generate the smoke/explosion Flipbooks
Base Color component of the explosion
The emissive component was also rendered, but I decided that the end result was too similar to reusing the base color as emissive to justify the performance cost of an extra texture sample.
Looping smoke simulation
