Psybeam - Niagara VFX
I’ve been wanting to showcase some Niagara fundamentals so I figured I’d make a stylised beam attack of my favourite gen I Pokemon: Alakazam.
“Psybeam” has gone through several iterations throughout the history of the Pokemon games but it’s retained a couple iconic features which I’d like to maintain and expand upon in my version;
it’s a pink high energy beam with caustic details along the length of it
the muzzle flare has circle elements and emits emissive circular shapes and dots
Below’s a breakdown.
First up is the aura particle system which uses a simple Skeletal Mesh Location module to skin the mesh on the fly and use its bones to spawn particles from. This allows the particles to contour Alakazam’s frame at all times.
The muzzle effect emits bubble sprites with a noise that deforms their UVs giving the impression they’re burning away like neurons.
The beam is a ribbon that expands outwards and then forwards. A cylinder mesh with a caustics material expands alongside it.
The energy trails meant for the spoons have a refractive material on them with some noise and tapering applied.
The smoke burst uses a flipbook along with a custom colour parameter which can be manipulated outside the particle system.
The material for Alakazam’s mesh has an emissive mask allowing independent control over the emissiveness of the spoons.
I used a post-prossessing volume to add a chromatic abberation effect
Lastly, I keyed in everything into a sequence including lighting and material parameter changes but all these properties could, of course, be fed into a blueprint instead for interactivity.