When the character reaches the cavernous environments, the lighting starts coming from sconces and braziers that are littered through these scenes. To be honest, I think the fire FX where what I struggled the most with, mainly because there wasn’t very many tutorials. The tutorials I did come across weren’t all that great. (Not to swing dig’s at someone’s work or anything), it’s more just that we were aiming for realism and the results I found weren’t ideal.
At first i followed this tutorial anyway, to see how it would look in the scene, but long story short, like i mentioned above, it just wasn’t what we were looking for. I did however like the way this guy tackled embers and smoke so I hid the flame sprites and kept the embers and smoke.
Gerteis, L. (2018). Unreal Engine 4 – Glitch Effect. [online] Art Station. Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XBeRey [Accessed 04 April 2019].
Results below
As stated earlier, I quite liked his ember and smoke setup, however I wasn’t a big fan of the sprite based fire. So i decided to delete the sprites and save the sparks embers and smokes for later.
I then stumbled onto another tutorial where the fire animation was based on SubUVs. The SubUV featured a 4×4 grid with individual fire sprites. And through a simple node setup, the SubUV sheet was cycled through a flipbook node that created a fire animation. The results were already ten times better and more to the point, exactly what we were looking for. The following youtube channel ended up being very useful and after this video I ended up sticking to the channel quite closely.
YouTube. (2018). UE4 Tutorial: Fire Effect. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Gya38KkJY&t=2s [Accessed 4 Apr. 2019].
After following this setup and ending up with a flame I was happy enough with, I combined it with the embers and smoke from the failed attempt.
This material also features a material instance that allows you to increase or decrease the speed, opacity and light intensity of the flames.
Further Experimentation in a test cavern scene
I also constructed a test cavern scene and began to play around with volumetric fog. The process was fairly simple, it just required me to have Exponential Height Fog in the scene. And then from there, checking the volumetric fog box and then dropping a light into the scene.
By default, the lights won’t interact with the volumetric fog without first increasing the volumetric scatter.
I quite liked the coloured flames but the team encouraged that we keep the flames a regular colour so there’s a nice contrast against the already unnatural looking lights. I
Final Result
I’m happy with how the following turned out, I’ll be using this image as reference when lighting the caverns.
Jack Creaner 
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