Because [Game] is a rhythm game, we have access to a lot of music-based parameters, such as the intensity of each frequency (from ~100 to 24000Hz) as an array of float data, and the Flux; which is a measure of the change in musical intensity as a moving average.

The Niagara system here uses the two of those to control the animation of the line (using the frequency data for offset, colour and intensity), and the ‘Flux’ to animate the Curl Noise Force which animates the secondary particles which are spawned from the line, such that the strong “wind” coincides with the louder sections of music.

With the version of Unreal the game was built in (4.27.2) Ribbon particles are CPU only, which unfortunately limits particle counts if we want to keep good performance.

• We spawn a ribbon with 1024 particles (same as the input float array) and set each of those particles to a position on a torus, using its ‘RibbonLinkOrder’ as the U position, so they are ordered.

• We then offset that ribbon particle from its initial position based on the music intensity value, mirroring the indexes so we get the symmetrical effect around the circle.

• We then spawn secondary particles from the ribbon using ‘Sample/SpawnParticlesFromOtherEmitter’ and inherit the position and colour from their place on the ribbon.

• We then apply curl noise force with the intensity scaling on the aforementioned Flux data, and slowly pan the noise so that it moves slowly, oscillating directions.

• We also have a variant of the secondary particles for lower settings with the curl noise disabled for performance reasons, and on even lower settings the secondary particles are disabled entirely.

This is a brief breakdown of all the VFX elements used in the credits sequence of the above game, with story-related details redacted.

I used a lot of music-synchronised Niagara systems and Material Parameters to accomplish the dynamic appearance of the scene, exploiting the access we had to data for different frequency bands within the music which allows us to have effects that react differently to low and high-frequency parts of the music.

Practically these effects would work for any music that was put through the game’s analysis, as is the case for effects used in the games other levels.

Every particle effect was set up with LODs, with simplified systems using lower particle counts and avoiding more performance-hungry calculations such as Curl Noise force and Collision. This was done to achieve >60fps performance on lower-end systems without just disabling the system.

Materials are set up using Mips and Material Quality switches to simplify more complicated setups on lower-end systems using the engine quality settings.

All textures used are 1k or less, excluding those used for the planet surface, which due to the massive screen space it occupies uses a single 8k texture in order to not have visible pixelation.