Stylized Fire & Embers VFX Set Up in Godot

VFX Artist and Technical Director at Tuatara Matt Ostertag, who specializes primarily in creating non-photorealistic visual effects, shaders, and lighting with Unity, has recently unveiled an impressive new VFX project, marking the first time he used Godot, a free and open-source game engine for developing 2D and 3D games.

Leveraging the new engine, the creator has set up an impressive stylized fire and embers VFX, using a GPU particle system, which acted as a collider detector, to spawn the ember sub-particles upon collision. According to Matt's comments, his first-ever VFX experiment in the engine was a pleasant one, with the artist describing Godot as a "very cool and accessible engine".

And here are some of the artist's earlier works, you can check out more by visiting Matt's official website, Twitter, LinkedIn, ArtStation, and YouTube pages:

If you would like to learn more about creating visual effects with Godot, here are some great tutorials that might help you out:

For those who might be unfamiliar, Godot is a cross-platform game engine released under the MIT license. It's designed to offer a complete and integrated game development environment, requiring no additional tools beyond those used for content creation.

Godot's architecture is built around a tree of "nodes" that are organized inside of "scenes" – reusable, instanceable, inheritable, and nestable groups of nodes. All game resources, such as scripts and graphical assets, are saved as files on the computer's file system, facilitating collaboration among development teams that use version control software. The engine is versatile and supports deployment to multiple platforms, including desktop and mobile, virtual and extended reality, and web platforms.

If you would like to learn more about the engine and get started with it, we highly recommend checking out our 80 Level Digest on the topic, featuring a selection of useful tutorials, articles, and books that cover the basics of using the engine, from creating your first project to learning some more complex features.

Speaking of Godot, last week, the team behind the engine presented Godot Development Fund, which is supposed to "create a direct way for everyone to help us secure stable funding and ensure the longevity of the project." The Fund allows Godot to "significantly" reduce platform fees, especially since the company doesn't charge VAT on donations.

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