Unreal Engine Experiments - Caustic Flipbook Generator
This is a work-in-progress/experimental tool to bake a tiling flipbook caustic texture using Niagara. The principle is very similar to UE's water plugin tool to bake caustics. Niagara is used to spawn hundred of thousands of photons hitting a moving water surface and being refracted by it until they hit a virtual surface below that water at a certain distance. The more distant, the more deviation they'll have and the 'stronger' the caustic will look.
The result it produces: a tiling flipbook with edge oversampling to avoid tiling edge sampling artifacts.
I had made this caustic generator in Niagara. This simulates hundreds of thousands of photon particles refracted by a virtual moving water surface.
Then I made a blueprint tool that could bake those photons into a tiling flipbook texture, kinda like UE's Water Plugin allows you to do.
Increasing the distance between the virtual water surface and the virtual floor below it makes photons spread apart even more and increase the 'caustic effect'.