Stylized Explosion

A stylized explosion made in Unreal Engine using Niagara and several custom-made materials to have more explicit control, as well as enable Niagara to drive various parameters including distortion, animation, emissive, normals, erosion, and so much more.

I made several custom Material Functions to keep the material graphs organized and reusable.
The vast majority of Niagara Emitters are using Sprite Renderers as opposed to Mesh Renderers, with the exception of the debris meant to represent the exploded barrel.

The environment re-uses the same (or a variation of) custom materials and/or material functions to achieve a consistent style.

While it's a tad out of scope, there are multiple unrelated endeavours in the environment scene, including a custom made Wind system and manager, as well as the butterflies (which are just simple models I threw together in Blender, and "animating" using vertex paint weights through Niagara) and such, so there's a lot more going on than just the Explosion VFX technically speaking. :)
While the explosion VFX is the highlight of this entry, the overall picture and 'experience' is important to me, and I'm ever eager to improve!

The trees and bushes, including their materials, models and textures were made by Zelma Lundgren (memla.artstation.com)!