Since the idea was for the screens to be on and the keybords to give a digital feel, i decided to create a few static visual effects.

To achieve this i created a plane Static mesh in which the VFX would be applied to, and created a texture from a number of alphas that i already had.

The alphas for the texture were imported to Photoshop and distributed in the green channel, with an additional one being put in the red channel. The alphas in the green chanel were going to be static, as for the one in the red channel i wanted to try giving it movement, even though i knew that in the final shot the movement wouldn't make a difference (aka. i simply wanted to do it).

The texture was then imported into Unreal and a Master Material for the VFX was created. I know, more technical stuff, but bear with me it's pretty cool.

For this Master Material there was only the need to make 3 parameters, one to control which channel was being displayed in the material (either the alphas in the green channel or the one in the red channel), another to control color and a final one to control which of the alphas in the green channel was being shown.

For this last one there was a need to make a set of 3 subparameters. One for the level of tiling, since by default the material would be showing the 16 (4 by 4) alphas of the green channel at the same time, i had to give it a tilling of 0.25 so that i could show only a singular alpha at a time.

A Second one to control the level of emmisivity.

And a third one to control which of the 16 alphas was beeing shown, since (with the tiling applied) by default the material would only be showing the top left alpha, what i did was put two "add" modules, one to control an X offset and the other to control an Y offset, the combination of these offsets gave me controll over which alpha was beeing shown.

For the alpha in the red channel i simply applied a rotation through "time" and "speed" modules and set up a color, obviously you can't see the movement in the image, but believe me it looks pretty awesome.

From this Master material a number Instances were created to make the various Visual effects that populate the level.