Quake Spells - Kingdom Hearts III Style Magic Effects

As part of my second year at IGAD/BUas, I was tasked with creating an asset for a chosen target game and doing research on pre-production practices in the process.
For this, I chose to create a new magic spell for Kingdom Hearts III. Like all spells in the game, I modelled it after magic found in the Final Fantasy series - in this case Quake. My final benchmark includes the three basic tiers of the spell: Quake, Quakra, & Quaga.

This project was my first proper foray into VFX and was created over the course 4.5 weeks, with an additional 2 weeks of research beforehand. The final effects were created using Niagara & Blueprints in Unreal Engine 4. Meshes and RBD simulations were created using Houdini and all textures were hand-painted in Clip Studio Paint.

Below you can find some more shots of these effects, as well as some of the slides of the technical document I had to supply alongside this project.