Procedural Generation in VFX

For most people, procedural generation means generators for roads, houses, and fences. But what if I told you it’s a great tool for creating effects?

Based on a closed spline, I generate a field with swirling trails inside. It can also work as a cylinder or a sphere.

Here I cover the objects with a grid of approximately 1,500 GPU instances each.

Looking at these examples, it’s hard to imagine that these assets fit within the budget of something like a simple grass patch. These effects are made entirely of GPU instances. For anyone who has looked under the hood of the engine, it’s obvious that values up to ~40k are perfectly acceptable.

I’m not saying it’s free, but compared to Niagara particles it’s basically nothing. And no one is forcing us to push instance counts to infinity. Of course, you might say there’s no animation — the asset is set up in the editor and behaves like a static sculpture in-game. But I’d argue that the per-point custom data already contains all the necessary information for animation — WPO, color, and opacity — and for someone with imagination, that’s more than enough.

It’s worth noting that the illustration above shows bounding boxes. You can use anything you want. Honestly, I don’t understand why solutions like this are so rare — the possibilities here are huge. An ideal solution for effects 100 meters and beyond. Hope I managed to inspire you to try something like this. Thank you for reading.