Unreal Technical Artist

Build a layered Niagara system with 4 emitters: 1) Flash emitter: single sprite, large scale (200 units), additive blend, 0.1s lifetime. Use a radial gradient texture with your magic color. Spawn 1 particle on activation. This creates the initial bright flash. 2) Spark emitter: 50-100 mesh particles (small cubes or custom spark mesh) with GPU Sim. Velocity: Cone distribution, speed 500-1500. Lifetime: 0.3-0.8s. Add Drag (0.5) and Gravity (-200) modules. Color: animate from bright core color to dark over lifetime. Light renderer: enable for the first 5 particles only (performance). 3) Shockwave emitter: single mesh particle using a torus or ring mesh. Scale from 0 to 300 over 0.4s using a curve. Opacity: 1 to 0 over lifetime. Material: unlit, additive, with a fresnel-based edge glow. 4) Smoke emitter: 10-15 sprite particles with SubUV animation. Slow velocity (50-100 upward), lifetime 1-2s, scale from 50 to 200. Opacity: fade in then fade out. Material: translucent with depth fade to avoid hard intersections with geometry. Total particle count at peak: ~120. GPU cost: approximately 0.3ms on mid-range GPU. Expose parameters: Color, Scale, Intensity as User Parameters for designer tuning.

Open world performance audit checklist: 1) Nanite check: run stat Nanite. If non-Nanite meshes dominate draw calls, convert all static meshes over 1K triangles to Nanite. Nanite meshes have virtually zero draw call cost and auto-LOD. Exception: translucent and masked materials can't use Nanite — budget these carefully. 2) Lumen cost: run stat Lumen. If Screen Traces are over 3ms, reduce the number of emissive materials and high-roughness reflective surfaces in the scene. Switch distant lighting to baked where possible. 3) Texture streaming: open stat streaming. If over-budget, reduce base texture resolution for distant terrain and foliage to 512x512. Use Virtual Textures for terrain materials to pool memory efficiently. 4) Foliage: Unreal's default foliage system is CPU-heavy. For dense foliage (grass), switch to Nanite Foliage or use GPU Instance rendering. Reduce foliage draw distance aggressively — players don't notice grass popping in at 30m but they notice 20fps. 5) World Partition: ensure your world uses World Partition with appropriate cell sizes (typically 256m-512m). Check that data layers are configured so distant cells unload their actors properly. Profile each step with Unreal Insights to measure actual impact — fix the biggest bottleneck first.