Real-time VFX
Destruction & Ability VFX
Real-time VFX for 46 abilities, 12 environmental destruction setups and eight boss phases in Unreal Engine 5. Astel Games authored Niagara systems, painted flipbook textures in Houdini and Substance Designer, and profiled every effect against the client's 2 ms per-frame GPU budget on base consoles.
- Client
- Confidential — global AAA publisher
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- Platforms
- PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
- Year
- 2024
- Duration
- 8 months
- Team size
- 7 artists
- Disciplines
- Real-time VFX, Technical art, Performance profiling
- Category
- VFX
Destruction & Ability VFX — cover artwork
Artwork from our archive. High-resolution originals are available on request under NDA.
The brief
What the client needed.
The title shipped on base consoles, so every effect had to hold 60 fps at 1080p with overdraw under control. Two earlier vendors had delivered Niagara work that passed art review but failed the client's automated GPU capture.
How we ran it
- Agreed a 2 ms per-effect GPU ceiling and measured every asset with Unreal's profiler before submission.
- Converted 30 particle-heavy effects to camera-facing flipbooks, removing most translucent overdraw.
- Built a shared Niagara module library so all seven artists used identical spawn, collision and curve logic.
- Ran weekly remote profiling sessions on the client's base-console devkits over a low-latency remote desktop.
- Documented draw calls, particle counts and scalability settings for each effect in a shared tracking sheet.
Result
- 46 abilities and 12 destruction setups passed the client's GPU capture on first submission.
- Peak screen coverage on the heaviest ability cut from 9.4x to 3.1x overdraw.
- The effect style and module library were reused by the client's in-house team for post-launch patches.
Have a similar production coming up?
Tell us the scope and the date. We will tell you what it takes — honestly, including what we would not promise.