Real-Time Game VFX Showcase

Final Fantasy XVI Trailer Lighting VFX

I immediately fell in love with this VFX shot from the FFXVI Trailer and wanted to learn how they did it, so I did my best to copy it.
To do this project, i analyzed the VFX shot frame by frame and broke it down into parts. Particles, meshes, textures and animated materials. For Blueprints, I attached it to an Unreal Paragon asset, and added camera shake and time dilation to give the shot its extra impact.

Star Wars Jedi Interceptor Crash Site

This was a project done for my Texturing and Shading for Games class, where for my final, I textured a spaceship model which I had made earlier for another project.
After I finished this projects main objectives for my class, I gave it a VFX pass with environment FX.

Responsible for all VFX, Lighting, Scene arrangement and Modeling and Texturing Jedi Interceptor spaceship. Environment populated with unreal marketplace assets. Landscape generated in Gaea.

Breakdowns

Embergen Flipbooks and Substance Designer textures.

Jedi Interceptor Flyby

This is my first project with VFX done entirely in Unreal Engine 5. This was a huge challenge to me as this was my first foray into Real Time VFX. I modeled and rigged the Jedi Interceptor spaceship with this project in mind inspired by the Star Wars Eclipse Trailer.

Magic Weapon Attacks FX

This was a collaboration with 2 other students, using their prop weapons to create VFX. This was my most ambitious project yet, capping off my time in school. I tried to use everything I learned about Real-Time FX in one big scene. I learned a lot about Blueprints in this project. It was definitely that "clicking" moment for me where everything started making sense and became a lot of fun.

Ice Impact FX

This was my final project for my VFX for Games class. I had a lot of fun in this class learning the Niagara particle system and everything that can be done with it.

Something new that I learned during this project besides the Niagara system was how to do material bump offset for the crystal effect. The crystals were modeled in Maya and textured in Substance painter and material bump offset was done in unreal to achieve the crystal look.

Ground Impact FX

This is a ground impact effect I created using Houdini and Unreal Engine. The sole purpose of this project was to learn how to use Vertex Animation Textures, but I also ended up learning better methods of doing smoke, collisions, blueprints, and location events.

Unreal Magic Egg

This is my Houdini Magic Egg project brought into Unreal Engine 5. For my RBD fracture pieces, I exported them as Vertex Animation Textures. The magic Effects were brought over as a Niagara flipbook and the lightning effects were done in Niagara and timed in Sequencer.

Responsible for Lighting and Scene Arrangement.
Environment consists of Unreal Marketplace Assets.

Original Houdini Project
This is a still from the Houdini project which I used to bring the FX over into Unreal.

After Image Dash FX

This was an experimental project in between my projects when I got stuck. It was really fun effect to do learning a new way to do things.