Magical Beam Attack VFX

Effects for a magical beam attack, made in Unreal Engine 5.4 using Niagara.
The colours for this effect are heavily inspired by the lesbian pride flag, which also inspired the heart and lipstick motifs.

Most of the elements in this piece are made of sprites and ribbon particles - the smoke uses several different mesh particles, which were generated along with normal maps in Houdini. The main beam also uses a custom end cap.

Overview of the procedural system for generating the smoke meshes in Houdini.
The high poly mesh is used to generate a normal map, which is used in the shader in Unreal.

The smoke clouds are using a ‘fake’ cel shader in which the light is a static directional vector rather than the actual lighting information from the scene. This is done because the more accurate approach using a post-process shader produced undesirable results and visual artifacts.

The lip-shaped dissolve on the explosion smoke was achieved through the use of ‘object-anchored’ screen-aligned UVs. These were set up in the material by remapping the screen space to the particle’s position using clip space, after which they’re scaled using the particle radius. This results in screen-aligned UVs that translate and scale with their object’s position and size on screen.

The material node network that generates the anchored screen UVs that are used for the lip-shaped dissolve of the smoke.

In total, the effect uses four unique meshes, seven unique materials and six material instances, a post-process shader, and five different textures (4x 1k x 1k + 1x 512 x 512).

An overview of all materials, meshes, and textures used for this effect.

Finally, some extra angles and stills of the effect!!

A still from the starting phase of the effect.

A still from the first impact of the effect.

A still from the explosion part of the effect.

The effect from various angles.