VFX Technical Artist Nick Pattas recently explored different ways to create randomized behavior within Unreal Engine’s Material Editor. His goal was to rely exclusively on textures, deliberately avoiding Sine and Cosine nodes.
To demonstrate this approach, Nick created a storm cloud texture that allows lightning strike positions to be changed at runtime with an infinitely varied random pattern. The cloud texture was authored in JangaFX’s Embergen using a simple three-point lighting setup, with data stored for nine distinct lightning strike positions.
Then, he used Niagara Grid2D to create a 32×2 Render Target Texture, and with just some dot product calculations, the system managed to jump from position to position at random. The result was a scalable, optimized setup that can be used for various applications in dynamic environments.