A three-month R&D push to prove out a cinematic experience in Unreal 5, built with a concept artist, an animator, and an environment artist. I owned all real-time VFX and effect shaders. The scene centered on an alien creature and a character caught in its reach, so most of the work was making something wet, translucent, and wrong feel believable in real time.

1. The creature - A translucent shader for the tentacles, a custom Niagara scratch pad module driving a ribbon emitter for the gooey ones so viscous material stretched and snapped correctly, and a disintegration shader that takes the tentacles apart when the creature is hit, timed to read as damage rather than a dissolve.
2. The energy - A shader for alien energy streaming into the character, and a powerful energy beam for the moment the alien is shot.
3. Thermal vision - A full-screen thermal vision shader for the whole cinematic, plus skeletal energy visible only in thermal, so the creature's structure read through its body when the camera switched modes. I then cut the thermal footage in After Effects to frame it as a camcorder that can see in thermal, so the mode switch felt like a device in the scene rather than a rendering trick.
4. Set and impact - A ceiling decal and an explosion particle system for the climax.

Built in Niagara, Unreal's material graph, Sequencer, and After Effects.