Inspired by the feel of Destiny 2's rework of the "Void" abilities released back in February 2022 and an older project of my own made back in 2017 ( https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VOBPP ), I decided to try and bring the visuals and functionality to Unreal Engine 5.
I ended up using a couple tricks out of my usual toolbox, both old and new, to build something that not only looks but also behaves similar if not better than the original reference.
I worked on this for about a weekend and had a lot of fun doing so.
All done entirely within Blueprint or Niagara using either vanilla or custom assets only.
Sounds were created for a previous project of mine.
The effect is functionally almost identical to other dissolver effects I built in the past.
The weapon's projectile creates a dummy actor on impact, which in turn manages particle spawns and driving material parameters over time as well as actor cleanup.
Explosion
Mesh particles combined with sprites. I tested if there was a performance benefit to using GPU particles only and an Attribute Reader to "parent" the gib trails, but it's negligible at best if not outright worse than CPU particles and events.
Body Dissolve
I wanted to have some remnant of the body fading out and the particle projection effect I built a while back was perfect for this. Super light-weight and dynamic at the same time.
Weapon Effects
(L -> R) Muzzle flash, projectile impact, charge-up.
The charge effect was originally part of a "pre-explode", but that ended up creating too much clutter, so I cut it.