Real-Time Smoke Simulation Created in Unreal Engine 5

The artist tested out the combination of real-time fluid simulation and real-time mocap in UE5.

Hirokazu Yokohara, a renowned 3D Artist and Generalist whose incredible simulations and visual effects made using various 3D software have been featured on 80 Level numerous times, has recently shared the results of a new jaw-dropping experiment.

As part of the new experiment, the creator leveraged Epic Games' UE5 to set up a highly-realistic smoke simulation and utilized motion capture to animate Yuki, a 3D character Hirokazu often uses for his projects, to play around with the simulated smoke. Unfortunately, the details regarding this project are pretty scarce, with the artist only noting that its goal was to test out "the combination of real-time fluid simulation and real-time mocap in Unreal Engine 5."

Back in 2022, Hirokazu demonstrated a similar simulation, using a combination of UE5 and Niagara Fluids plug-in that allows adding smoke, fire, explosions, water, splashes, and many other physically plausible effects to your UE projects to set up a beautiful real-time red and blue fire and smoke FX:

Previously, the artist also demonstrated a stunning real-time fur simulation made in UE5, a cool deepfake face made with Maya and DeepFace Live, and a neat smoke FX made in UE5 and Niagara, showed how to simulate clothes in Blender with mocap data, how to set up a realistic face with Maya and Ziva Face Trainer, and how to utilize Apple's RoomPlan for 3D environment modeling, experimenting with soft body simulations in Cinema 4D, and turned a 2D image into a 3D mesh with Blender. You can check out all of these projects and more by visiting Hirokazu's Twitter page

And here are some great tutorials that will help you get started with smoke simulations in Unreal Engine 5:

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Published 15 August 2023
Theodore McKenzie
Head of Content