I wanted to explore some shader tricks and led to adding some context with a car from the free content Epic give away and an explosion.
Flipbooks from embergen - super useful for one shot effects and fast to use.
Flipbook processing for a couple of them to make them loop - I did this in houdini with the new cops context - it was pretty flexible and easy once I figured out the approach.
I made a specific kind of animated erosion with evolving flow driven erosion map to help those big smoke flipbooks fade out more plausibly.
Also had a quick test of the in engine tools in unreal 5.x for weighting and setting up simple controls - the car was a basic static mesh but it was pretty fast to add a skeleton, set weights and setup controls which can be used easily in sequencer - doing all that in engine was strangely liberating, but also felt weird not having to do it in DCC.
Super unhappy with the dotty flame trails on those metallic fragments so I will look to replace them with a better option at some point, but the overall effect is alright I think.
Sequence showing vfx and simple anim using a basic control rig.