I’ve been meaning to post here more, I really like this forum and real time stuff is super fun.
This is an effect I did for a Houdini Course I took last semester. I wanted to push myself and do something in Unreal so I looked into (finally) trying to understand how VATs work (I still don’t really think I get it but I’m somewhat confident I can use it as a tool so that’s good).
I wanted this effect to be an area control effect in a hero shooter environment, like Mei’s ice wall, but using lava that cools and solidifies as a part of the effect. Here’s what I came up with: https://youtu.be/pHNSkQQRPIE
And Here’s a breakdown of the effect in Houdini: https://youtu.be/_1f4Es9hC5s
I start the effect with a static mesh for a projectile, then when it collides I check the normal of the collision and if it’s the floor it spawns a new blueprint, which just plays the animation then shows a static mesh (the actual mesh exported by Houdini is just a cloud triangles, it’s also way higher poly count than the static export so it really should not exist for very long). Here’s what the 3 Meshes look like:
I made the parts of the mesh which cool quickly shiny, like obsidian glass, and the slower cooling bits more rough looking to actually mimic how cooled lava actually looks. I’m really happy with the final look but I think I could work more on the initial lava shading, maybe even have it glow, and shoot sparks and smoke or something.
My next step is going to see if I can get this running in Godot, it’s seems like quite a challenge since the Unreal material graph for reading the dynamic remesh textures is kind of a mess that’s been hard to parse. If anyone knows of any secret documentation as to how Vertex Animation Textures work I definitely need to read up on this system a bit more.