Butterfly Burst

Butterfly burst is a visual effect created with Niagara in Unreal Engine 4 as part of my daily practice sessions.

A friend challenged me to create an effect involving butterflies, and I wanted to experiment with particle vertex animation.

In UE version 4.25, meshes spawned as particles cannot have a skeleton, and therefore cannot be animated in the normal way. One way around this is to use vertex animation textures (VATs). Vertices are keyed and transform information is stored in textures. Using an appropriate material, the texture will move the mesh as if it was animated with a skeleton.

Luckily, UE4 provides scripts for converting skeletal animation into vertex animation textures, but only for 3DS Max. Thus after finding a good butterfly model, I rigged and animated it in Maya, exported into 3DS Max, and converted the animation into texture data. In the process I uncovered a UE4 material bug, which was passed on to Senior Technical Artist Jon Lindquist.