This project was meant to be a deeper dive into Houdini's procedural mesh and simulation capabilities!
The debris and dirt on the lightning bolts were both done as simulations, rendered to flipbooks and played using SideFX's own pre-made material for flipbooks inside of UE5.4.

The lightning bolts were done in Houdini using some of the Labs nodes, notably the Labs Lightning node which did a lot of the work for me. From there i adjusted some geo and the UVs, then built a material to scroll the textures on the mesh.

Originally this FX was following this tutorial from SideFX and Ben Christensen https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXNFA1EysfYlBShtZsLf3vowOK6DBVoOJ&si=ggaIyzWomeT2ePTB

Characters
Attack Dummy Rig: https://srrubfish.gumroad.com/l/poncho
Shadow Knight Armor: https://fab.com/s/f1e478396d19

Character Animations
Actual animations on Dummy were done by me.
Scabbard's 1H sword animset pro: https://fab.com/s/caaf9aa9b3fa
Paragon Kwang: https://fab.com/s/0ac63a696ee8