"Wherever you are, light it up, and I'll find you"
Overview
This project is part of Pawel Margacz patreon tutorials.

The idea of this project was to take the smoke I learned from Pawel and make my own version of it which is inspired by the smoke/flare from the Netflix series (Arcane) specifically the end of episode 6 which is my favorite scene in the show. I know that the effect is 2d so I wanted to try and recreated it in real time.
Reference 1
Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 2
- Erosion at the start to simulate the holes on the flare that jinx was using
- Erosion at the end to make the smoke fade away
- Also the smoke starts very emissive and gets darker as it fades
Mesh
I used Houdini to create the base mesh for the smoke. The idea is to create a bubbly shaped mesh to give the shape of a stylized smoke. First, I started with the main sphere, scattered points on it and then copied spheres to the points. After that, I used VDB nodes to connect all the spheres smoothly together, did a remesh and reduced some polygons because we don't want that much. Finally I adjusted the scale to fit properly inside the engine and exported the fbx file.
Smoke Mesh
Smoke Mesh
Breakdown
I made a simple texture using cells in substance designer to be used as the main texture for the smoke erosion.
Cells Noise (substance designer graph)
Cells Noise (substance designer graph)
In Unreal, I created a quick material setup. I added dynamic parameters to be used in Niagara, a fresnel effect and an erosion texture controlled by a smoothstep for the smoke (used to give the smoke a cool effect especially when fading away). Also I used TwoSidedSign node to assign a different color to the inside and outside of the mesh.
Material Graph in Unreal Engine
Material Graph in Unreal Engine
​​​​​​​Then I went to Niagara, created a Niagara system and started building the effect in components (emitters): 
- Smoke --> This is the main component which represents the smoke/flare.
- Sparks --> This is the sparks that was emitting after jinx lighted the flare.
Niagara Viewport
Niagara Viewport
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