Creating Incendiary Burn FX for Game Characters

Production-Ready Unreal Engine 5 Workflow With Ashley Lyons

Learn how to create a production-ready Niagara particle system that ignites a character before dispersing them into a dynamic cloud of smoke, ash, and embers.

In this 6.5-hour workshop, Lead VFX Artist Ashley Lyons demonstrates a practical look at the techniques and workflows used to build complex visual effects for real-time applications.Ashley begins in Unreal Engine's Material Editor, where he discusses how core material nodes work together to create dynamic, parameterized materials. Starting with the foundational burn effect, he demonstrates how to build flexible master materials and expose parameters that allow artists to quickly customize and iterate on the look without modifying the underlying material structure. From there, Ashley moves into Sequencer and Niagara to build and refine the particle effects that bring the character's destruction to life. His lessons cover custom Niagara modules, emitter setup, particle spawning, movement, timing, and procedural controls, showcasing how to create reusable systems that provide artists with direct control over the behavior and appearance of the effect.

This workshop also provides a detailed breakdown of a Houdini pyro workflow, covering everything from source creation and simulation setup through solver refinement, rendering, and flipbook texture generation. Artists will learn how to prepare simulation data for real-time use and export the resulting render layers for integration into Unreal Engine.Substance Designer is also incorporated into the pipeline to create procedural textures used by the Niagara ember system, demonstrating how multiple tools can work together within a cohesive production workflow.

Throughout the workshop, Ashley emphasizes industry-standard approaches to parameterizing materials and Niagara systems, making it easier for artists and other departments to customize, iterate on, and integrate effects into their projects. By the end of the workshop, artists will have a practical understanding of a complete real-time VFX pipeline spanning Unreal Engine, Niagara, Houdini, and Substance Designer.

The workshop includes downloadable Houdini and Substance Designer project files, as well as all textures used throughout the course.