Vine Growth – Oskar Thölén

Vine Growth/Blast

For this project, I was inspired by To The Sky’s Godbreakers and wanted to explore a similar visual style while pushing it in my own direction. Through iteration and feedback from the VFX Apprentice community, the effect gradually grew into something of its own – I also knew I wanted to practice blending meshes and particle systems together for this project, which is what sparked the idea of Vines Growing.

This project gave me the opportunity to dive deeper into Control Rig, one of my favorite Unreal Engine 5 tools, as well as combining Niagara, shaders, and Blueprint to drive the effect.

A particular challenge was synchronizing the flower bursts. Since the flowers spawn at different times depending on their position along the vine, I used Niagara custom parameters and Blueprint-driven timing to ensure they could still burst simultaneously.

The vines themselves are procedurally generated using randomized values in Blend Spaces, brought to life through animated values and physics inside Control Rig.

Vine and energy Shader

Vine & Energy Shaders

Both the Vine and Energy Vine shaders are primarily driven by two animated parameters:

Opacity Mask — reveals the vine along its length.
Dissolve — controls the flower-driven energy burst.

Vine Shader
The opacity mask is built from texture coordinates and an edge texture, creating tendril-like shapes that are slightly offset and blended together for a more organic reveal.

The dissolve is driven from the flower’s randomized position. Blueprint assigns flowers to random sockets along each vine, and the shader generates a sphere mask around the flower to create the localized dissolve. A custom UV space allows the sphere to drive additional texture shapes and emissive edges, while depth-based calculations prevent the effect from repeating on the opposite side of the mesh.

Energy Vine Shader
The energy version uses a simpler mask setup, but adds multiple layers of the central energy region and a softer outer layer. These masks also drive distortion, concentrating the movement around the flowers.

Two flowmaps are blended back and forth to add wispy, scrolling movement. During the dissolve, I animate values such as mask size and emissive strength, creating the impression of energy building up, overloading, and flowing down the vine before the flower bursts.

Procedural Vine Animation

The vines are procedurally generated and animated using Animation Blend Spaces, Animation Blueprints, and Control Rig.

Procedural Variation
During construction, each vine receives randomized 0–1 values for two Blend Space axes. These control the vine’s horizontal curl, ranging from left-facing through straight to right-facing.

The same Growth Value drives both the animation and material, blending each vine from its initial curled state into its randomized final shape. This creates a large amount of visual variation while keeping the system highly controllable.

Growth & Collapse
A second Blend Space controls whether the vine grows upward or falls toward the ground. This is synchronized with the dissolve, allowing the vine to build tension as energy travels down it before collapsing when the flower explodes.

The final direction is also randomized, giving each vine slightly different falling and rising behavior.

Control Rig Secondary Motion
On top of the Blend Space animation, I added physics-driven Control Rig chains for secondary motion. Their settings can also be randomized per vine, creating additional sway and “snakey” movement.

This helps break up the otherwise simple Blend Space interpolation and makes the procedurally generated vines feel much more organic.

Vine Animation Blueprint, Control rig and Blend Spaces

Flower Control Rig, VAT and Flower Niagara System showcase

Flower Control Rig & Niagara

The flower animation is built with a Control Rig and then converted to a VAT for use in Niagara.

Control Rig Animation
Each petal uses a Look At setup, with progressively stronger weighting along the bone chain for a natural curve. A single control drives the transition between closed and open states by blending between two targets.

Adding jiggle physics to each petal chain gives the opening animation a subtle bounce and secondary motion.

VAT & Niagara
The resulting animation is converted to a Vertex Animation Texture (VAT) using the AnimToTexture plugin within Unreal Engine, allowing the animated flowers to be rendered efficiently as static meshes inside Niagara.

Because flowers are spawned at different times depending on their randomized position along the vine, they also need to synchronize their disappearance with the final explosion.

I solved this using Niagara Custom Parameters and a custom timer. A single Boolean trigger from Blueprint starts the timer, which scales every flower from 1 → 0 and simultaneously retriggers the VAT animation, snapping the flowers from their open state back to closed.

This means one Blueprint trigger controls the timing of every flower, regardless of when it originally spawned.

Niagara Emitter Breakdowns

Supporting VFX Elements

The final effect is built from a combination of billboards, meshes, sweep effects, and shader-driven particles, each handling a different part of the explosion.

Most of these elements are intentionally simple, using custom dissolve masks, scrolling textures, vertex displacement, and animated geometry to create variation across the effect.

One detail I particularly liked was the smoke shading. The smoke uses soft normals, with the resulting lighting information also fed into the material’s color. This allows the lighting to naturally darken parts of the smoke, giving the relatively simple particle meshes a stronger sense of depth.