Here's How To Cheaply Fake Lighting On Particles In Unreal Engine

Creative studio Tuatara shared a nice trick to fake lighting on particles with SphereMask in world space. If you add a Vector3 to the Object Position node, it can be offset to any desired position.

SphereMask is a pretty powerful node with a lot of curious use cases, but there are way more other interesting tips shared by Tuatara. For example, this 3D effect is created with a swarm of 2D sprite particles with flipbook swimming texture and the additional vertex shader movement:

This setup showcases how you can map textures to the geometry with Depth Buffer and BumpOffset node, which can be used for damage effects:

See more of Tuatara's tips below and check out their X/Twitter page for more educational Unreal Engine content:

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