Ep8 - Learning about Lighting - Learn with Us: First Playable Grenade Explosion | BFX-U

Learn how to light up your effects in this latest tutorial.

Ep8 - Learning about Lighting - Learn with Us: First Playable Grenade Explosion | BFX-U

Finishing Touches 

Welcome to Episode 8 of this BFX-U | Learn with Us course, teaching you how to create a plausible grenade explosion in Unreal Engine 5. By the end of the last tutorial, you should have created a pretty polished explosion effect, complete with rocks and debris. Beyond-FX’s General Manager and Founder Keith Guerrette, and Director of Marketing & Content Julian Bahmani, your hosts for this series, will now help you focus on putting together the finishing touches to your design. 

Episode 8 is available right now, alongside the rest of the BFX-U | Learn with Us course. Make sure to check out previous episodes on the Beyond-FX YouTube channel, alongside prior blogs on our page. Keep an eye out for future series and ongoing courses, such as our Level-Up program, which is designed for experienced artists. 

Episode 8 - Flicking A Switch 

At a certain stage, your effect will suddenly come together, and lighting is a massive part of that. In this episode, the team will be talking you through utilizing light, which can be quite a simple process, but very costly in terms of the optimization of the effect within the game.

Keith Guerrette and Julian Bahmani discuss the issue of performance and optimization when it comes to creating your effects, with further guidance given of what to look out for and how to get the best visuals from your project. Performance and optimization is ultimately a massive area of discourse, which we encourage you to research further. 

For the lighting, many of the principles that have already been covered in this course are relevant once more. With the strong foundation that you’ve built from prior episodes, you should have a greater understanding of how to edit color, intensity, and other property elements to bring a crisp quality to the effect.

Previous Episodes:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Episode 7

Next Episodes:

Episode 9

Episode 10

Coming To A Close

You may have noticed, we’re running out of episodes! This BFX-U | Learn with Us course is coming to an end very soon, but that doesn’t mean your questions should stop. Reach out to us on social media as you continue with your own experimentation. Are there any light-based concerns that you have that you want to share with the class? 

Not only can you support one another in our community, but you can also show off what you’ve been working on. We want to highlight some of the effects designed from this tutorial series, so send in your explosions by tagging us on Twitter @Beyond_FX, now that the light has been switched on! The penultimate episode of BFX-U | Learn With Us: First Playable Grenade Explosion is available to watch straight away. 

Want to stay in touch with our studio as we craft world-class real-time VFX? Follow Beyond-FX on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, & TikTok!