Swarm

Swarm

by | May 8, 2025 | Explorations

Audio spectrum driven particle system

A Niagara system in Unreal that is driven by an audio track

 

 

I’ve looked at several vids walking through this process with various degrees of sophistication. Most are pretty straight forward and give some nice results but are often difficult to control in a more detailed and specific way. I came across this fellow Jack Kim over in Korea that had a way more interesting rig. I based my work here on his stuff. Check him out and flip on the CC to get the auto translate into English. This should get you most the way there.

This project is a WIP to learn a few things for something bigger I’m working on. I thought this was fun on it’s own so I’m posting this vid. Just some temp lighting and such for now. I’m not necessarily an FX person but I like learning a bit all over the place. Complex system are interesting and the addition of driving things with the audio spectrum is just fascinating to me. Lots of nice happy accidents in there. The audio track if you’re interested is Rhino Jockey by Amon Tobin from omg 25 years ago.

Emma_001

Emma_001

by | Mar 18, 2025 | Explorations

Animated texture projection

“Automatic” playback of texture projections. Setup with blueprints in Unreal—  

 

 

My inspiration for this was the original Alien movie from 1979. Remember the scenes on the Nostromo where the crew was seated at their console? You could see the graphics from their monitors projected onto their faces. Not realistic at all of course but quite a cool feel to it even after all these years.

This project brings several things together. The character I’ve done a good amount of work on. The default metahuman materials are a wonderful starting point but I have made some adjustments to bring things to life a bit more. Skin specular and sub-surface adjustments, the eyes and hair have had adjustments too. The textures for the skin are a matched set of 8k images that give wonderful detail and realism.

The texture projection is achieved by a multi-light setup controlled through a blueprint that allows for control of the chromatic spread, the light’s cone angles and various attributes. Unreal allows only a monochromatic texture on the light. If you want the RGB it will require 3 lights one for each channel. Hope this might be something that will be updated at some point down the road. There’s another blueprint for controlling the playback of the video file used in the texture for the lights. Auto start and playback, looping, etc.

The main scene lights are using hdr images to help vary the shape and tone of the light as well as the shape of the specular highlights you see in the eyes. It all helps to remove a bit of that cg curse so often seen in other renders.