Sword Slash Effect ‐ Niagara VFX

As part of a 7 week group project, we collaborated with students from Future Games in Skellefteå to create a game slice from the IP Imperiets Arvingar comic book series. Our task wask to build an environment, from scratch, using the white box layout and game mechanics provided by Future Games. The game evolved around a boss fight, within a cave environment, but we decided to take this one step further and create an outside jungle area to add more of a gameplay element to the game slice, whilst also enabling us to create a montage story within our game trailer video. The genre we were given was a First Person Shooter game (FPS) but we also integrated a Third Person camera angle for when the sword was in use.

As part of the project we were assigned the task of creating special effects, using the Niagara System, within Unreal Engine 5.1. In my case, I chose to undertake the task of creating a 3 stage sword combo for the game character. This involved creating a mesh inside Houdini for the sword arc path, creating the texture inside Substance Designer, setting up the material inside Unreal and then poiecing it all together inside a Niagara System.

The sword animation itself was sourced from a 3rd party developer and re-targetted onto the Unreal Engine mannequin, integrating the Niagara effects into the Blueprint.

For a first attempt, I was happy with how this came out, but I look forward to taking these skills forward and creating a more complex effect. For the future, I will have to allocate more time for creating the effects as the whole process from start to finish is very time consuming when having to build the mesh, texture, materials and Niagara System from scratch. It was much more of an undertaing than I was expecting!