At last year’s Game Developers Conference, Epic Games released the “Infiltrator” real-time demo. It ran 100% in Unreal Engine 4 in real time, and blew the collective minds of gamers everywhere by showing off the engine’s high-end rendering features as well as the latest tools developers can use with it.

If you didn’t get to check it out, here it is (best watched in 1080p):

Recently, Epic published the latest installment of their Inside Unreal – Visual Effects series (which you can check out below). In it, Epic’s Francois Antoine and Zak Parrish give a behind the scenes look at the “Infiltrator” demo and show how artists can build 3D volume texture explosions using Unreal Engine 4 like the one that’s showed off about halfway through the video above.

As you can see in “Infiltrator,” one of the key features of the fiery explosion is how it just doesn’t stay in place and burn below the player. Instead, it grows and shoots upwards, giving the impression that it’s “rolling through the geometry and expanding,” thereby engulfing anything that stands in its way.

Francois and Zak go into great detail about the fireball effect and how it works, including how they used techniques similar to that found in film visual effects to achieve the look.

Check out the video above, and then sound off in the comments section, or on Twitter @ArtistryInGames, with your thoughts. What is the future of explosions in video games? Do you like the way the fireball seemingly rolls upwards? How can these effects be implemented most successfully in games on the new generation of consoles?