Space RFX | Unreal Engine 5.1

For a Uni assignment we were tasked with creating 3 effects in UE 5.1.
Two being fairly small effects, and one being a big "build-up".

I chose the space theme, settling with a:
- Rocket booster effect
- Meteor rain effect
- Portal Build-up (large system)

As with any other art piece, the first stage was concepting.
Personally, I'm a huge fan of the Infamous game series, and thus tried to mimic the style of my favourite game of the series: Infamous Second Son.

Rocket thruster

The rocket thruster is split up into 3 main parts, being the rocket flame and afterburner, the smoke, and the sparks.
The flame and afterburner were the most challenging of the bunch, for which I had to make a custom material.
Since I really dislike making custom sprites, I decided to do it all in Unreal.

The base material consists of just some noise nodes, one horizontal, one vertical, with their UV's moving based on a time parameter. There are then combined, and multiplied by a mask, in order to get the desired shape.
This then get's applied on a sprite, that gets scaled downwards over it's lifetime. 
If you add enough of these together, you can create a fairly nice flame effect.

Meteor Rain

The meteor rain consists of the falling meteor itself, as well as some impact effects.

The falling meteor is just a simple mesh with a fresnel effect to simulate it burning, rotating over it's own axis.
To this, I then added 2 meteor shields. One with a long tail, and one shield in the front.
These shields again utilised a material with a noise, which UV's move based on a time parameter, being masked out by a gradient.

As soon as the meteor impacts, a burn decal gets spawned in, as well as various smaller meteors get spawned, bursting into smaller and smaller pieces.

Portal

The portal again is also built up into several parts.

It's fairly complex, so as to not make this article too long, I'll oversimplify the explanation a lot.

The first one being lighting bolts rotating upwards.
This is done by having 18 particles spawn on a circular shape. This shape then moves up and scales in and outwards as it rotates, creating the location for the lightning particles.
I then, using a location event, transfer these locations onto a 2nd emitter, that receives these locations, and with a ribbon renderer, generates the lightning effects (which are used multiple times throughout this whole system.

As these bolts all converge to the centre, several sparks go inwards generating a ball.
This ball is just a simple mesh, using a material with world offset and opacity.

Both these can be controlled by the emitter.

As the ball explodes, it bursts into what could be seen as "fireflies". This is just a whole bunch of particles spawned on a sphere, with some jitter and curl noise added to their movements.

As the orb bursts, it shoots a ray downwards, and opens up a portal.
This portal again utilizes the same lightning effect that I spoke about before, and also uses a custom inwards rotating gradient effect.

After the fireflies shoot out of the portal, it dissolved into a half orb, which eventually disintegrates into fireflies.
This orb also makes use of a custom disintegration material, again also using noise being masked out. However, in this instance, that mask is controlled by the emitter itself.