Unreal Engine 5 – 3D Game Art Fantasy Swords – Niagara VFX

Welcome to the definitive course on creating your first game art sword from scratch all the way into Unreal Engine 5. In this thorough course, we will create 100% game ready swords geared for complete beginners and will be updating the course to add more intermediate and advanced methods and swords. Complete with 3D modeling and UV unwrapping in Maya, baking and texturing in Substance Painter, and implementing awesome VFX on your sword into Unreal Engine 5.Even if you’ve never used any of these software packages before, we go through everything like navigation and hotkeys. All of the swords are built to be real-time friendly, expertly crafted, super low poly, scalable, clean art. The 3D models and visual effects we will cover are optimized to not affect frame rate even in large games with multiplayer.

We use only industry standard software, but if you are more comfortable with other softwares such as Blender, you should be able to follow along just fine. A lot of what we cover is best practices and optimization. We go over how even using simple geometry, you can make some really cool weapons and props. Substance Painter is by far the most awesome 3D texturing software on the market and you can usually get free trials and student discounts.

For our extra visual effects content, we use Unreal 5’s Niagara next generation VFX creation system. It’s a visual particle system that utilizes modules, freeing the VFX artist from any need of programming. You also create your first materials in Unreal’s node-based editor. And we go over how to make a dark shadow sword and a final lightning sword effect, both of which makes your weapons really pop and feel enchanted. This is how you create an arsenal for your game and make each swing more satisfying for the player. These steps can to be used to make any props for any games like first person shooters, RPGs, MOBAs, or any kind of game that needs cool weapons for combat or awesome story driven props.

Starting out with a basic weapon then adding VFX can be something that comes from character buffs, enchantments, or rare props and items. All major games with combat systems use tons of visual effects for impact and to get players excited to start swingin’.

When you purchase this course, you will be provided an asset pack with assets specifically made for this course.If you get stuck at any point, you can check out our files for your notes to more easily follow along. No need to worry about anything as its all provided for you.
This includes:

• Finished Swords 3D Mesh assets 

• Unreal Engine 5.4 VFX Uassets

• Final PNG Textures

• Core Autodesk Maya 2024 Files

• Core Susbtance Painter Files

• Core ZBrush Files

• Core Photoshop Files

• Any VFX Textures and Flipbooks

• Core Krita Files

We also include our Discord community where we have a Course QandA Forum for you to ask any questions, get feedback on your work, and check for questions already answered. As we expand the course, we will be going over more advanced swords with more detail and multi layered VFX, so it will scale in difficulty as you improve your game art skills.

In this course, we will be covering the following topics:

Beginner Section

• Downloading the asset pack in the resource folder

• Creating our first folder system base which helps keep our files organized (It’s very easy to lose track of all of your files if you don’t stay organized)

• Downloading the best industry standard art reference software

• How to crop images and pack them together, add text labels to organize your reference board, and scale the software window

• How to move the software window around to make sure it always stays in front of your current software but not in the way

• Downloading the best Auto Smoothing Mel script (For all of our Maya users. But don’t worry you will never have to code in this course)

• Start with the basics in Maya 2024 where we’ll learn how to navigate around in our Maya scene, explore the main UI options, move the camera around, and spawn 3D objects

• Learn how to manipulate geometry using Maya’s widget and core quick menu system. This allows us to shape geometry however we want with faces, edges, and vertices. We’ll also go over fast ways to select multiple faces all at once rather than one at a time

• 3D modeling practice lecture: step-by-step guide on how to model a snowman, using Maya’s outliner, duplicating and resizing meshes to model faster, cutting into geometry with the multicut tool, and using extrusions to make a top hat for our snowman

3D MODELING THE FIRST SWORD SECTION

• We then spawn a cube and start modeling the first sword

• Activate and use symmetry which helps shape both sides at once, cutting your work in half on many props

• We also go over how to fix symmetry if it’s broken

• We then dig deeper into Maya’s options while modeling the handle and handguard

• We go over how to use the primitive mesh inputs menu, making it easy to optimize our polygons quickly using subdivision sliders

• How to delete geometry

• Extrude and taper the handguard for a more stylized flair

• How to mirror geometry in the right direction

• We then go through one of the hardest parts of making assets for many which is the UV unwrapping stage in Maya’s UV editing tab

• Texture resolution discussion

• Use shaded mode to quickly check for UV overlapping

• Manipulating UV shells

• How to use my favorite UV tool “Camera Based” on your models

• Mirror geometry to our advantage to share UVs with both sides of the 3D model

• Packing all of the UV shells into one sheet ready for texturing

• The fastest and easiest ways to make clean UVs to help you get past this step like a pro

• Create new materialsfor our swords

• Renaming our materials and proper naming conventions that game studios will expect

• Reduce file sizes and fix some Maya errors

• Setup incremental saves so that it always saves to the same folder directory

• Activate auto saving incase Maya crashes or your file becomes corrupted so we will have backups

• Substance Painter basics to learn how to setup a new project scene

• What options to use in Substance depending on your resolution needs

• We then go over basic navigation in Substance Painter with the 3D and UV scenes

• We learn how to go back to Maya to make edits and reimport back into Substance Painter without having to start a new project

• How to bake mesh maps, and learn the importance of baking and best settings

• We learn about the layers tabwhich is where the texturing magic happens

• Create folders for each piece of our sword, then add base colors to each piece

• Use Substance Painter’s awesome masking brushes

• Fast shortcuts to be able to texture a 3D mesh quickly

• Save time by duplicating base colors and putting them into other folders

• How to use Substance’s color picker and color wheel settings

• How to soften and harden 3D mesh edges to give it a chunky metal feel

• Exporting textures and understanding the basics of Substance Painter’s Output Template texture nodes and global settings

• We learn how to export only the textures that you want and save them to your folder system

• We discuss the differences between the two most popular texture types and why you might use one over the other

• We learn proper texture naming conventions, important in large projects to be able to find everything as your game scales

EXTRA VFX SECTION

• We then move on to the extra VFX portion to make our sword look even cooler!

• We first go back into Maya to combine all of our sword pieces into one and export it out

• Duplicate the blade mesh that we will use for lightning and dark magic VFX

• We learn how to change the UVs to adapt it for VFX and why its important to export it separately from the sword

• We’ll next go into Unreal Engine’s website to download and install the engine and the Epic Games Launcher client

• How to get the current latest version of Unreal Engine, which is 5.4, and start a new project.

• We’ll then go over basic navigation in Unreal

• We will learn the main importing options needed to bring in our sword meshes

• How to create a material using Unreal’s Material Editor Graph with our exported textures from Substance Painter

• We’ll have an overview of Niagara’s viewport and navigation

• We’ll discuss the difference between a system and an emitter in Niagara

• We create the three emitters that will be used for the sword VFX

• We’ll then do a brief overview of the translucent and additive material blend modes and a little bit on bug troubleshooting

• We discuss how to change the size and colors of the mesh in Niagara

• We learn how to customize preview scene settings to your preferences

• We will add a cool glowing edge to our blade to help make it stand out

• We’ll then start building our lightning material base using the Noise node, one minus node, and panner node

• We’ll go over keyboard shortcuts to make your workflow faster

• Then we learn how to manipulate UVs inside the material editor.

• We learn how to use a sine wave node in the material editor to create more interesting movement

• How to quickly change the lighting within our scene

• We cover system and emitter lifetime settings, something that can be tricky but is key to understand for VFX

• How to correct rendering order when you are using multiple materials of the same type so nothing is hidden

• We go over coloring our sword darker with materials, showing what changes we made from the lightning sword

• How to change our lightning sword into a dark evil sword VFX

This is just the first part of our three-part course.
We will send out announcements when we begin updating the second intermediate sword and the third advanced sword!
So make sure to buy the course early before we add the next sections to get the best price!
But for now we got some swords to blacksmith, some buffs to cast, and skills to attain.
We have a community of developers and level up your game art from beginner to pro level.
Get help and feedback from our team to build up your art portfolio.

This course is geared toward beginners to intermediate students. You don’t have to have any previous knowledge of Maya, Substance Painter, or Unreal to get started.
If you are interested in other learning resources, we have other Udemy courses as well as hundreds of videos and livestreams on our YouTube channel, Baka Bros Entertainment, where we are actively making our debut indie game, Chaos Kart!

If you’re ready to have some fun making awesome weapons, props, and VFX, get ready to learn a ton and let’s get to smashing barrels and cutting down our foes!
This course is going to be our biggest and best course yet! And we are super proud of the work and polish being put into the Unreal Engine 5 – 3D Game Art Fantasy Swords – Niagara VFXcourse. We have put months into recording and editing this course together and we hope you love it.
After taking this course, you will be able to make any style of swords and props you can imagine, and be able to add awesome VFX to them. This will be sure to make you stand out as a 3D artist.
Join the course to invest in yourself and your future game development career.
Cya in the course!

– Daniel, founder of Baka Bros Entertainment
And

– Amelia our VFX Artist (Daniel’s wife!)

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Frequently Asked Questions

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