Senior VFX Artist Vitaliy Lupul, with whom we had the pleasure of speaking a couple of years ago, recently shared a new fantastic project that feels very smooth and perfectly balanced, featuring Wukong’s almighty staff.
As Vitaliy explained, the trail behind the staff was implemented using Niagara’s Ribbon renderer, finely tuned for smooth motion with a subtle blur effect, utilizing UV tiling settings. There’s also a secondary ribbon created with a masked shader and dithering, which adds a powerful splash of water, giving the effect of water being thrown back as the staff spins.
The water splashes themselves were created in JangaFX’s LiquiGen and rendered as an 8×8 flipbook. A masked shader with dithering was used to prevent overdraw and achieve smooth sprite fading.
A while ago, Vitaliy also delved into some exciting experiments with Unreal Engine 5’s Niagara to push the boundaries of procedural lightning generation. His research focused on creating intricate lightning structures with additional branching effects:
For this grenade explosion VFX, he used the Lyra sample project to implement gameplay effects, creating an explosion simulation in EmberGen and exporting it as 8×8 flipbook smoke textures with a Motion Vector Texture. Vitaliy baked six lighting directions into texture channels and created a shader to interpolate between them based on the scene’s light source. Finally, he built a Niagara system with a single emitter for all smoke layers, which works well for personal use.
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