 So now that the AC Introduction series is complete, if you are new to the channel, welcome aboard and thanks for watching. This is actually a indie game development and 3D animation channel, and generally what I do here is organize important information that computer artists need in the shortest, most concise tutorial videos possible. And the next up on our list is Special Effects in Unreal 5. So let's talk about the specific targets that we will be aiming to learn to cover over the next few weeks. Special Effects is something that I've always wanted to take a good stab at because in today's world, good special effects can really carry your game super far. And just to demonstrate what I mean, I just wanted to go through with you guys and analyze one of my favorite fight scenes of all time. Fight scenes are specifically what we're going to try and recreate in Unreal 5. So these are the kind of effects that I'm going to be focused on. So I just wanted to analyze Saitama vs. Janos with you guys and tell you what parts of it that I noticed that I really want to try and learn to recreate. I was going to show you the whole fight scene first, but that got me a copyright claim, so I'll leave a link to it in the description. OK, so right off the bat, there are two things I really want to do. The first is make the molten power glow off the character and the steam coming off of those glowing areas. I really think that's what sells this scene for the battle that's about to come. I don't know how difficult steam is to do in Unreal, but that will be one of the first things that we try and figure out. Now here, even though there's no character animation going on, I like the flow of the cape. You have to learn how to do some cloth and dress and skirt physics, but more importantly, the dust blowing in the wind is a really nice effect to that. While it's simple, I think it really adds to the sense of depth in the scene. OK, then we have fire blasts coming off of his shoulders, which is sick. I love how the color is tinted where it goes from blue to orange, just like in a real fighter jet engine. Also, you see those little circular pulses of energy coming out? That's pretty sick. It's a nice small detail, but it really makes things look better. Then immediately after we have dirt and rocks flying off the ground, rubble is going to be a huge part of making cool looking fight scenes in Unreal. And of course, we have the screen shake to add the feeling of power coming from the scene. I really think a lot of people underestimate how important screen shake is, so we're going to have to look into that too. Then explosions, oh my god, love them or hate them, Michael Bay knows what's up. Explosions are a super important part of any fight scene. Then we have the giant dust clouds form. I think a lot of people overlook how important dust is in a fight, but it's kind of a serious part of any real looking scene. And again, we have the circular pulses of power that we need to figure out, but this one is a bit more fiery, whereas the other one was kind of more clean. Now I love this trick, and what I love about it is the wind circle around combined with the electric lightning when he's doing it. It really adds a sense of speed and power while he's performing this move. And once again, notice the rocks flying up in the background that really sell the destruction of the environment. Something else to notice here is the entire thing is slow motion. The clothes and the hair are actually still moving quite a bit. This is probably the cleanest looking ways to demonstrate slow-mo in action. And while it's not really realistic, I think it just looks really cool. So this is the way I'm going to try and look to build some of the systems in Unreal where the characters are moving in complete slow-mo, but their clothing is actually still waving in the wind a little bit. Now when we get to this scene, something I really want to try and create a system for is the ferociously fast blurry backgrounds that you see behind the character. It's not a real background, but what it does is highlight how fast the character is moving to the viewer. Here we have the same background effect, but this time you can actually make out what the environment is vaguely supposed to represent. Off the top of my head as a developer, I'm thinking we're probably going to need to create a few different sets of these blurry backgrounds for our fight scenes, probably a forest, mountains, a desert, rocks, ocean, sky, and then the arbitrary speed blur that we can change colors for when we need. If we just had those, that should probably be enough for most of the fights. More fireballs, but this time we can see the sparks flying out, which is always a cool little effect. So we're going to need to learn how to make sparks. And I don't know what this is called, but the little twirly gig energy trails are super dope. I have no clue how that works, but hopefully it's not too difficult. And again, the super fast blurry abstract background, the debris, the lightning, the slow mo clothing in the wind. I mean, oh my God, those are probably the four most important things that we're going to need. OK, now here in this scene really highlights why I think the dust is so important, because I promise without the dust and the airwaves, this scene would probably not look as cool. And this kick, the animation was actually super simple. He literally just brought his foot up. But what prepares you for the force is the moving air trails in the background and the electricity that's about to come thundering down. And again, we have the blurry speed background. And I don't know if you could see it, but there's like these little tiny speed lines on the edges of the frame that really highlight how fast he's going. I'm guessing that's probably a post filter camera thing will probably have to do, but we'll figure that out later. Boom. OK, beautiful, destructible environments. Luckily, we just finished learning about destructible environments in Unreal. So that's not going to be too big of a problem. We'll just have to figure out how to add the electricity, the dust, the debris and the rubble on top of it. And I think you should probably start seeing a pattern here. Like a lot of these fight scenes are just different combinations of those main special effects that I just listed, you know, the environment, the rubble, the dust, the lightning, the energy pulses. So I think once we just have those basic elements, we can probably mix and mash them together to make pretty much all the effects that we see here. Now, I don't know what this is called. It's like a JJ Abrams lens flare monstrosity, but it's hella cool looking. And I'd like to see if we can get something close if possible. And, oh my God, the way the ground breaks. Mid-firing during the cannon is, I love that effect. We're definitely going to try and replicate that later. I've actually never noticed this, but the way Saitama dodges this move is by jumping from this rock to the second rock, and then straight up into the sky to avoid the whole blast. And what did I tell you? The circle energy pulse thing, destructible environments, dust everywhere, debris, fires, smoke, good lighting. If we can just figure those things out, I think our fight scenes will probably get a lot more mileage. Now, here's a bit of a different take on these circular pulse things. It looks like there's two kinds. The first is the fast one, where you can barely see them. And the second one is this lingering, kind of slow moving one that fades away. I don't know how different those would be to make, but we're going to try. Okay, can we talk about this awesome speed blur thing? I have a bit of a confession to make to you guys, and that is I have a soft spot for these really, really basic cliche anime teleportation effects. I'm sorry, I don't care what anyone says or does, but these little flash steps, so-need-o blurs, will never stop being cool to me. So that is something I actually really don't know how we should handle in Unreal, but we are definitely going to try, because oh my God, they just look so fucking cool. Anyway, continuing the fight, we got missile trails, which are always cool, but then we have this really cool effect that's like a combination of motion blurs after image and teleportation stuff. I know in 2D, this stuff is really just drawn in, but in 3D, we're going to have to figure out a way to try and get a similar looking effect. Also, everything being a blur, including the background, I think adds to the chaos that the viewer is probably experiencing. And you know something else that I'm realizing is a very important selling point in this fight scene, and that is the ability to have slow-mo dust and debris moving when the character is completely still. I know Unreal has some features that let you freeze the global time for the game. Like when you press pause, it tells the whole game to stop time, but I don't know how that system changes when you want the environment to slow down, but you want the player to stop completely. So that's a question we're going to have to answer later on, but hopefully we'll figure that out later. HUD and GUIs, yes, luckily, we figured out most of that in Unreal already, so that really shouldn't be a problem because we just got to find an artist who makes cool buttons and stuff and basically just replace the default UI stuff with that. Next little detail here is the force impact effects that you can see when he clamps his hands. It's like the air explodes, not really dust, but that's an effect that I'd like to try and have, and I love this scene. It's not just because it's funny, but it's also because I have this cool sword slash effect, which, yeah, we're gonna need a lot of slash effects, but from a character animation standpoint, nothing in the frame changed. From this point to this point, everything cool in this scene is literally just a special effect. It was all debris, dust, wave of motion, and camera shake. And of course, you got the afterimage teleportation effects, and again, I know this is a common 2D thing, these black pointy speed lines. I wonder if there is a material or a shader we can use for this in 3D. I love the air pulse circles around his fist when he punches. It's kind of like the stuff we saw when Captain Falcon was fighting Lucina, and the rest is basically just screen shake, debris, dust, and wind. So as you can tell, there's a bunch of stuff on the list that we're gonna try and take a stab at here in Unreal. Obviously, we're probably not gonna figure everything out, but at a minimum as a developer, I think it's important for us to at least understand how the construction of this stuff works and how to create them if we absolutely need to. Because if you're nearing a deadline and you're on crunch time and your special effects guy calls in sick and your game has to come out tomorrow, you know, sometimes you just gotta do it yourself. So in those emergency situations, as the developer, I always think it's a good idea for you to just know how it works. So if you join me next video, we will start our dive into special effects in Unreal 5. Thank you so much for watching and as always, hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.