VFX Agent

Aura can create and edit Niagara particle systems from natural language descriptions. Give it a prompt and it'll generate a complete multi-emitter system — including materials, textures — saved directly into your project. This provides a starting point for further manual iteration and styling.

ℹ️ Make sure you're in Agent mode to use the VFX Agent.

⚠️ The VFX Agent is in alpha. Save and back up your project regularly. Token costs are not optimized. Support for Unreal Editor earlier than 5.6 is currently limited.

Creating a Particle System

Switch to Agent mode and describe the effect you want. Aura will build the Niagara system and save it to your Content Browser.

Examples

• "Create a fiery explosion effect."
• "Make a looping rain effect with water droplets."
• "Create an ambient floating dust mote effect."
• "Create a campfire effect with rising embers and smoke."

💡 VFX generation can take longer than other tasks — Aura plans the system, builds materials and textures, validates the structure, then assembles the emitters. You can work in a separate chat thread while it runs.

Workflow Tips

• Name the effect type clearly. "A soft ambient glow" is harder for Aura to parse than "a looping ambient particle effect with slow-moving, faintly glowing orbs." Describe the visual clearly and Aura will choose the right recipe and modules.
• Describe the context. Mentioning where the effect will be used — "an explosion for a grenade," "an ambient loop for an underwater cave" — helps Aura make better decisions about scale, density, and timing.
• Review in-editor before iterating. Open the Niagara editor to preview the result before asking for changes. Seeing what Aura built helps you give more specific feedback.

Current Limitations

We're actively working on improving the VFX Agent. It'll only get better from here!

Undo behavior

The VFX build process bypasses the standard undo stack to call Niagara APIs directly. If you undo after creating a system, the asset may not be fully removed. If this happens, delete the asset manually from the Content Browser.

Transparent materials

Created materials may require manual wiring of the texture’s alpha channel to the material’s opacity override. Additionally, the material’s blend mode may need to be manually set from ‘Opaque’ to a blended one.

Complex custom requests

Aura works best with clear effect archetypes. Highly custom or stylized requests ("a painterly watercolor splash") may produce unexpected results.

Limited Unreal Engine Version Support

Currently, functionality is limited in UE versions 5.5 and earlier. The emitter stack will get created but some parameters and modules will be left to their default values.