Hazel Stagner | Portfolio

VFX Study: Cartoon/Anime Explosion

An anime/cartoon explosion effect created in Unreal Engine 4 for practice. I really wanted to push myself to see how close I could get the effect to looking like hand-drawn reference animations, and I feel like I accomplished what I was after.

The core flames of the explosion are a handful of expanding roughly spherical meshes with a custom shader. I baked a noisy voronoi heightmap texture from Blender which is used for vertex displacement, flame ramp, and smoke erosion.

Simple ring meshes on the ground with an erosion shader creates the ground shockwave

The same shader with a different texture / mesh combo creates more pressure waves. My goal with these was not only to add visual interest, but to add an element that would visually clarify the “hitbox” of the explosion to a player.

The flaming debris ejected from the explosion is created with ribbon trails with a simple alpha erosion + flames shader.