The burning wood is just an emissive mask with some noise to simulate some flicker in the wood.

Particles

So finally down to the fun parts, spawning all the particles. I had a fair amount of trouble to get the particles to spawn where I wanted, so I made a very simple rig for the campfire and skinned where I wanted the particles to spawn from with the help of “Skel Vert/Surf Location” node (not really a node I suppose since I did it in Cascade, but in the lack of a better word I’ll use it for the different sub-menus of an emitter) in the particle editor. It’s very simple to make them spawn from a skeletal mesh, Unreal documentation has a short explanation of that.

This way I could get the fire to be a bit more connected to the campfire without moving around emitters, I still had to add emitters with particles not spawning from the mesh but it gave me a good base to work from.

One important thing to make the particles look like I wanted was to change the screen alignment (in the Required node in the Particle Editor) to PSA Velocity, that way they’re aligned to the direction they’re moving in.

After that it’s just a lot of playing around with values, a good tip for quite a few effects is to spawn them invisible and just fade them very quickly. That way the particles don’t pop-in from nothing, I used it for all of my different particles in this effect.

In the end, I ended up with 14 different emitters, 6 fire emitters (4 spawning from different parts of the skeletal mesh), 3 embers, 1 heat distortion, 2 smoke emitters, and 2 light emitters.

Difference Between Stylized & Realistic VFX

I’d say the biggest difference between stylized and realistic is shader work and optimization. There’s obviously some things that more or less different depending on theme etc, but overall it just requires a different mindset.