Heat Distortion and Blur VFX for Unreal Engine

1. This effect has been designed to use in cinematic visual effects. It has been thoroughly tested in sequence renders, but has not been thoroughly tested for use in games. It is possible the high quality blur may slow things down, but there are ways to reduce overhead (watch tutorial video).
2. Blurs and distortions will look different when played in real-time vs. rendering from the sequence editor. The effect will have a higher quality in a render but will also be less pronounced. For renders, you may find that you want to increase the strength of the effect by dialing up the Distortion Intense and Blur Intense properties.
3. Due to the nature of distortions in Unreal Engine, when Distortion Intense is set very high, the edge pixels of the screen may repeat/stretch. If that happens, a good solution is to render your project at a higher resolution with slightly wider framing so that you can crop out those edges when you bring your footage into your video editing software.

A perfect companion to the Unreal heat distortion effect is our VDB Fire and Explosion elements! Combine these with heat distortion and you will create the hottest effect on earth!