An in-house Niagara meteor shower: falling fire, long smoke trails and impact heat, built to see how much sky we can fill and still hold real-time.
Meteor is a self-driven R&D piece, no client, no brief, just a question: how many burning bodies can rain across a frame before either the read falls apart or the frame budget does? It became a testbed for our Niagara trail and translucent-smoke pipeline.
Each meteor is a small stack: a fire head, a ribbon of smoke and a scatter of trailing embers, spawned in waves so the shower reads as depth rather than a flat curtain. Every layer is its own Niagara pass, so timing, colour and density can be tuned without touching the others. The looks below come straight from the editor.
Techniques proven here feed straight back into client ability and environment work: impact showers, comet trails, falling debris. That's the whole point of keeping an in-house lab burning.
Project details · subject to NDA where applicable
Curve-driven spawn takes a single meteor from a lone streak to a full sky with no new authoring.
A lean translucent material keeps a whole shower real-time: the look survives a frame budget, not just a render farm.
The trail and impact pipeline drops straight into client comet, debris and impact-shower FX.
Click any plate to break the shower apart: each layer is a separate Niagara pass, captured straight from the editor and explained.
Every system playing together: fire heads, smoke ribbons and trailing embers spawned in overlapping waves. This is the target the breakdown works back from: once the depth and rhythm read here, each layer can be tuned in isolation without losing the storm.
“The best R&D never ships on its own. It shows up six months later inside someone's hero ability.”
Prefer email? Write to impact@studiosgz.com.
