WebGPU Lands 🌐, Unity Portal Shader ✨, Mario PS1 🎮
🌊 Advanced Unreal Engine FX & Systems
How to Write Niagara Data into Render Targets in UE5
Senior Technical Artist Pavel Ksenofontov breaks down how to make a Niagara system write data into Render Targets in Unreal Engine 5. His step-by-step setup walks through creating a GPU emitter, wiring User and Emitter Render Target variables, and using a Generic Simulation Stage that iterates over pixels via a Data Interface. He finishes with a simple test module to confirm correct indexing. The post also links to more UE5 tips and free tools on his LinkedIn.
Building Interactive Vines in UE5: Niagara, Nanite, and GPU Physics
Rare’s Quentin Warnant shows how to turn static vine meshes into fully interactive foliage using a custom GPU position-based dynamics solver in Niagara. The system simulates chains of nodes on a Grid2D, then drives Nanite deformation via render targets and world position offset instead of Niagara renderers. He covers wind via 3D noise, robust SDF and character collisions (with swept-sphere fixes for tunneling), and detailed GPU optimizations. It’s a practical deep dive for anyone pushing foliage, Niagara, or Nanite in Unreal Engine 5.
🧠 Level Up Your Unreal Workflow
50+ Hard-Earned Unreal Tips From Real Projects and VR Nightmares
Alex Coulombe’s Unreal Fest session is a rapid-fire tour of the tricks, traps, and workflows his team learned the hard way shipping real Unreal Engine projects—especially in VR. He covers everything from subtle rendering costs and lighting strategies to replication quirks, Sequencer landmines, mocap/MetaHuman pipelines, and OpenXR pass-through. Along the way you’ll pick up editor time-savers, performance hacks, and debugging patterns that never show up in official docs.
WebGPU Hits All Major Browsers, Unlocking Next-Gen Web Games and AI
WebGPU now runs across all major browsers and key operating systems, bringing desktop-class GPU performance to the web. This modern successor to WebGL enables advanced 3D graphics, AAA-style gaming, and high-speed compute for AI workloads through a clean API and powerful compute pipelines. Features like Render Bundles can dramatically cut CPU overhead, with Babylon.js seeing up to 10x faster rendering. With engines like Unity, PlayCanvas, and Three.js already supporting it, game developers can start targeting WebGPU today.
🌀 Experimental Shaders & Visual Magic
Mesmerizing Corruption Portal Shader Brings a Parallel Dimension to Unity
Technical/Environment Artist Mochie has built a striking corruption shader in Unity that renders a portal into a hypnotic parallel dimension, complete with textured stars and adjustable colors. The feature also spotlights Mochie’s other Unity experiments, including wind and water simulations. Rounding things out is a mini-gallery of wild shaders from other artists, from wobbly outlines to liquid corruption and butterfly effects.
Super Mario 64 on PlayStation 1? The Ambitious Fan Port Explained
A modder known as Malucard is tackling a wild challenge: porting Super Mario 64 to the original PlayStation, despite the N64’s superior raw power. The current build is rough—floating trees, broken animations, and incomplete camera controls—but it already shows off serious low-level engineering. Developer Elias Daler breaks down why this is such a big technical deal, and the code is available on GitHub. The piece also highlights an N64-style Hollow Knight: Silksong demake built in Godot.