As the Lead Technical Artist on Life Unfolds, I was tasked with creating and refining all of the visual effects elements within the game. To stay consistent with our game style, the VFX had to fit in with our papercraft-inspired theme. The following shows our character death effect, water effects, fire and smoke, a poof, bug animations, and a confetti effect.

Original Character Death Effect. (Wait for it!) - As you grow old within Life Unfolds, those around you will eventually pass away. Our first pass at character death involved slowly overlaying a crumpled paper texture onto a character's existing texture and then tearing them apart with an interpolating opacity mask. After a few playtests we realized the death effect was a little too jarring, so we had to tone it down a bit.

Both the crinkle amount and the dissolve amount are driven by timelines in a character's blueprint.

Final Character Death Effect - Our team kept the overlaying crinkle effect and ended up going with a simple fade out when a character passes away. This was a little tricky in UE4 though as we couldn't just use a transparent material to make someone disappear. That would cause polygons behind the character's skin that are facing the camera to still be shown, creating a weird layering effect. (The dog on the right suffers from this.)

To solve this I used a masked material with a DitherTemporalAA node feeding into to the opacity. A dissolve amount, which changes the temporal AA, is still driven by a timeline in the character's blueprint. With this setup I was able to achieve a flat fade out.

Fire and Smoke Effect - The fire and smoke effects for the cooking area and camp fires are being generated through flipbooks in Cascade.

Water Effects - Water flails for the waterfalls and fountains were animated with keyframed joints in Maya, while the water material is continually translated in UE4 to give the flowing effect..

Insect Effects: Bees, Dragonflies, Butterflies, and Fireflies - The bees and fireflies were given life as mesh particle systems in Cascade, while the butterflies and dragonflies each received a custom keyframed motion path from Maya.

Confetti Effect - A simple confetti effect used to celebrate monumental moments in the game.