I had this idea going around my head for some years and thought UE was the perfect program to produce it but I couldn't get it to look the way I wanted and then couldn't get past a paywall for a "closer" look; I wanted a random pillar with a flame on top in the middle of the raging ocean in a brewing storm.
The vanilla water system from UE didn't had that much to play around so I tried to learn my way into Niagara until I hit another wall called "the hardware limits of my computer", so off to Blender I went. I knew there's an ocean modifier that works pretty well (I helped myself to a tutorial) so I felt like trying that out and everything worked pretty well until I began adding foam, particles, rain and rain colliding with the ocean surface. That's when the hardware kicked in again before even thinking about the clouds.
So, I first I ditched the rain+collision, then the particles, then the foam, then I added a couple of VDBs for clouds and another one for the fire. Besides using a volume cube for depth I wanted there to be actual volume for the lightning to play a bit "inside" of the clouds; the clouds are also moving a bit.
For the light I used area lights and for the lightning I used a GeoNode recipe I found online. At first I was trying to make the lightning travel inside of the cloud with emission curves and couldn't manage to make it look good so I animated the area lights instead.
Because of hardware limits I ended up sacrificing looks and rendered the sequence using Eevee after doing several adjustments to the volume and samples, then I isolated the fire and rendered it with Cycles using very few samples. After that I used After Effects to comp it, added extra lights, rain and post-processes, and then the sound effects I gathered from Freesound.org.