Unreal drone show vfx
Unreal 5.2
This Project was done over the course of a month as part of a VFX in Unreal class. It was my first time working with Niagara and scratchpad, and I originally took the class to understand more of unreal, trying to get out of just the programming aspects.
Starting out
I really enjoyed drone shows since I was a kid, and I wanted to see if I can emulate the effect. I saw a video of one of the drone shows in China and decided to use that as my reference. I ended up with 1 emitter for each spline, and gpu emitters for the falling leaves, branches and ferns.
Splines
Going in I didn’t realise how troublesome it would be, for the splines I ended up getting a tree model and manually drawing the splines in editor around the tree. To get the dotted lights, I actually spawned all the dots in advance and used scratchpad to turn them on and off at the right time, together with the right spacing between each dot.
All the settings are exposed in editor, and one thing I didn’t consider at first was that the length of each spline was different, so I had to take some extra calculations to account for that. Scratch pad actually crashes a lot in my experience. But other than that, it was pretty fun to figure it out.
For the leaves and branches, I used the same model, but hid it ingame, and use mesh sampling to spawn the dots around them. The falling pedals that moves to form the text also uses the same principle, using hidden 3d text meshs.
My overall experience
I’m pretty happy about how it turned out, considering it was my first experience with it. The feedback that I got was that it would be a lot easier to have done it in Houdini, then import it over, which I might try doing next. Doing this and my Houdini class really ignited my interest in doing more VFX related work.