VFX Portal

VFX Portal made in Unreal with shaders and Niagara particle systems. I am using a render target to get the environment in the portal, so you can place the render target camera where you want it in the world. This effect could also be done with a cubemap to save performance, but it would not give the same parallaxing effect. The shader is using some flowmapping to make it look interesting. The render target camera follows the XY rotation of the player camera. The rotation center of the render target camera is also a bit infront of the camera to give the parallaxing effect, as rotating from the center of the camera won't give you any parallax.

Initially I really wanted to make the portal with only a shader, but found that it didn't look all that interesting. So I made a shader with too many effects in it, so basically a very advanced/expensive shader that didn't look all that interesting. So I moved on to a more simple shader but added a particle system.

The particle system is made from 4 emitters, 3 GPU particle emitters and 1 CPU particle emitter. The GPU particles are just controlled with different forces. The one CPU particle emitter is spawning planes around the portal edge with a refraction shader to distort the background around the edge of the portal.