A study piece, built to get my Unreal skills back up to speed after four years shipping in Unity. The starting point was Gnomon's tutorial on building a charged energy beam in Niagara, sequenced in Sequencer. I followed it through to understand the structure, then kept going. I wanted to have a iridescent look to it so I added the chargeup smoke particles, some spherical rings for the blast, and to keep it cohesive added rays to the beam, built to give the beam a clearer anticipation and a stronger sense of impact than the base version had. Those additions are where most of the thinking went, since a beam without a readable wind-up is just a line.
Niagara is the system I most wanted to be fluent in again, and this was a fast way back into emitter structure, module authoring, and how Sequencer drives effects for a cinematic beat.