Creating a Flame Burst Effect Using Unreal Engine 5

Introduction

Hello everyone, my name is Kirill. I'm a VFX Artist who previously worked as a 2D generalist. Here, I want to talk about my artistic approach to creating real-time effects. I'll do that using one of my recent works as an example, Flame Burst, created in Unreal Engine 5 using EmberGen. I clearly knew two things: my effect had to consist of an energy buildup and an impact, and it had to focus heavily on well-tuned timing, almost like classical 2D animation.

Everything else I left to a "straight ahead" approach, similar to frame-by-frame animation, where you don't always know what lies ahead, but the emerging result becomes more and more exciting as you go. Once I had settled on this idea and approach, I opened EmberGen to simulate the flipbooks I needed.

Flame Burst

As usual, everything started with texture generation and blocking out the main elements of the effect inside the particle system. I created the flame bursts using simulations in EmberGen and baked them into an 8×4 flipbook (since the elongated flame shape allowed for a 1:2 frame aspect ratio):

To create sprite sheets, I usually use the free software GlueIT. I also had a smoke flipbook that was meant to be attracted toward the center of the system to enhance the feeling of a large amount of energy being "accumulated." I put everything together in Niagara, and the rough blockout was ready:

However, I wasn't immediately satisfied with the composition. I'm used to giving myself artistic feedback to improve the overall look of an effect. To do that, I usually take a screenshot directly in the viewport and then move to Procreate to make visual sketches of how the effect could be improved.

To tighten up the composition and add stronger guiding lines, I decided to add spirals of magical energy converging toward the very center of the effect. This is a fairly common technique, and it felt like it would work well here, too:

Fire Jet

The base for the fire jet shader was inspired by the Real-Time Magic 2 course by Dmitrii Sokolov, also known as balaganvfx, with some adjustments made to fit my own needs. The core idea is to combine refraction and several panning noises within a single material to achieve the look of fast-moving fire. I exposed scale, speed, and color settings in a material instance, which is then played on a beam particle using a ribbon renderer:

Here are some of the textures I used to achieve the desired look:

I also wanted the jet to appear from start to end and disappear in the same order. To achieve this, I added a linear interpolator between two gradients in the material. Since I don't define the fire color in the particle system itself and instead control it through the material, I used the R channel from the ParticleColor node to switch between the gradients:

I also added emitters with smoke, sparks, and additional flame bursts to the main fire body to enrich the effect further.

Rendering

To enhance the overall impact, I animated the camera in Sequencer using piloting, along with Look At Tracking and a relative offset, so the main object would always remain the focal point.

To further amplify the impact, I created several Blueprint classes with camera shakes and placed them in the Sequencer.

Conclusion

That's it! This effect is not particularly complex from a technical standpoint and focuses more on motion, color, and the merging of different VFX techniques, such as flipbooks, shader animation, and mesh-based animation. I hope you enjoyed reading this short breakdown as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Kirill Anchikov, VFX Artist