Need help with an effect

Basically, I want to develop a complex, togglable, effect. This effects includes a few things. Firstly, upon toggling the effect on, I want lightning to swirl around the player’s character model (either in a cylindrical motion, or as close to each limb as possible) in an unstable way until it engulfs the entire model. Upon engulfing them, it needs to be suppressed and the player model glows a bit, whilst also having arching lightning coming, at random, from all over them, which arcs, either, into the ground or back into the model, as well as glowing eyes. The final part of this effect would be that there is a trail of this lightning effect as they run, which appears to be generated from their hands, waists, feet, shoulders and head (so, basically everywhere).

  1. Is it even possible to achieve all of these effects?

  2. Are there any tutorials for these effects that are available online? (Help me, senpai) (Can you please leave me some links)

  3. If there is any programming involved, I don’t really use blueprints, so can you find me the C++ alternative if there is one?

  4. Can anyone help me out with this? xD

  5. Thanks to all that help.

Most trailing type of effects use animtrails.
For glowing eyes you would just add a parameter in the characters material to increase emissive. If the eyes don’t have their own material then you’d just mask out that section of the uv.

The “Intro to Cascade” tutorials are good.

You could look into tornado effects tutorials and basically make a lightning tornado around your character by using more jagged textures.

Getting stuff to swirl around limbs may be tricky. it would involve some trial and error to figure out something that looks good.