DeathFX makes characters disappear when they die - and appear again when they spawn. The body dissolves along a moving front and Niagara particles fly off exactly where the mesh is disappearing, so the material and the particles always stay in sync.
Seven styles
Ash - burning ember edge, charred skin, sparks and ash flakes rising.
Glitch - digital voxel dissolve with scanlines, slice jitter and cyan pixel debris.
Dust - noisy sand break-up, heavy grains falling, light dust haze.
Ice (new in 1.1) - frost creeps up the body, then it shatters into falling ice shards and glints.
Void (new in 1.1) - purple energy edge, black corruption, purple embers and dark smoke.
Electric (new in 1.1) - flickering blue arc edge, crackling sparks and flashes, small electric jitter.
Stone (new in 1.1) - a petrification wave turns the body to stone, then it crumbles into rocks and dust.
Death and appear
Every style plays both ways. Play Death dissolves the character, Play Appear runs the same effect backwards and builds the character up from nothing - for spawns, respawns, teleports or summons. Hide For Appear keeps a character invisible until it appears.
One call
Add the BPC_DFX_Death component to a character, pick a Niagara system and a duration, and call Play Death or Play Appear. The component drives the material through Custom Primitive Data and spawns the matching Niagara system attached to the skeletal mesh. AutoPlay, AutoAppear and DemoLoop options for quick tests.
Works with your own characters
MF_DFX_Dissolve is a material function: plug your Base Color and Emissive in, connect its outputs (Base Color, Emissive, Opacity Mask, World Position Offset) and set the style parameters in a material instance. Enable CPU Access on the skeletal mesh for Niagara surface sampling. You can also skip the Blueprint and animate the Progress parameter yourself.
Customisable
20+ parameters: dissolve direction and range, noise amount and scale, noise mode (smooth / grains / voxels), edge width, colour and intensity, char / frost / stone band and glow, flicker, scanline speed, slice jitter, character height.
Included
7 Niagara systems (CPU, skeletal mesh surface sampling)
1 dissolve material function + example character material
14 ready-made style material instances (7 styles x 2 mannequin slots)
3 particle materials + 3 particle material instances (ice shards, smoke, rocks) and 5 textures
Blueprint component BPC_DFX_Death (Play Death, Play Appear, Hide For Appear) + demo actor
Overview map (all styles looping) and Death Demo map (death and appear loop)
UE5 mannequin (Epic Games sample content) in Demo/Mannequin, included only for demonstration
No C++ and no extra plugins (Niagara only). Built and tested in Unreal Engine 5.0.3.
