VFX in Unreal 5

Unreal 5. I had been wanting to learn the ins and outs of this engine for years, but literally ALL of my career has been in Unity. While I was happy to keep creating content in Unity, I had always had this envious feeling seeing all the cool new tech constantly being added to Unreal. Meanwhile in Unity we are still using third party plugins to play VFX in the UI…

So to start things off, I knew I needed to get my feet wet and start with the basics. I found this awesome video on Youtube from UnrealSensei that’s 5 hours long, but covers a lot of the ground work to just get in the engine and start doing things.

From that point I moved onto looking into videos related to Niagara, and ended up finding this course from Gnomon Workshop, guided by Pawel Margacz. I’ve always loved stylized VFX and this seemed like a strong entry point. The tutorial also covered a lot more than just Niagara, such as Materials, Blueprints, and setting up the scene for demoing your FX.

Over all I was pretty happy with the results from the course and feel like I got a good basis to try making my own FX next.