Hi everyone, this is my new project that I would like to work on for the next few weeks.
The idea is to launch drones and send them to attack a certain point.
creating an attack point, a cycle
drones appearing and circling around the right hand
launching drones and flying to the attack point.
launching projectiles at the attack point and the drones disappearing. Final
The beginning of my work
In this project I would like to test several things, first I would like to make realistic explosions, then something magical and something stylized, let’s see if I have enough time for this. The appearance of the drones for each style, I would also like to play around with it.
I started choosing the appearance of my character, I tested Lira for a day for this task, but it is always so difficult to understand its structure, unfortunately I am not a programmer and this is not easy for me. Then I just looked at what’s new in Unreal 5.6 and decided to use the combo system, it is quite suitable for this task.
One technical point that I would like to test in this project is the release of the new Houdini 21. They released a lot of interesting things and I think I will see how cool the shader in Karma they made for explosions. Pyro Karma Houdini 21
First I’ll start with the blueprint logic and how the particles interact at each stage of the effect, then implementation of the looks, since I’m still at the beginning of the journey.
I still can’t figure out the last piece of logic, so that when I released the drones, they would appear on the back again and the whole chain would start working again.
It wasn’t easy to work with all these checkers for conditions.
Blueprints aren’t my strong point for this kind of task. I’m sure if I worked with them for a while I would have collected different trixes and it would be much easier to assemble such things.
And also, when I started working on this task, I made 4 particles, the first one on the hand, the second one on the back and two particles of animation from the back to the hand and back, but I got a couple of problems with motion blur, when the particles don’t know their previous location and when updating they create new ones in another place, in general, it’s quite a task.
So I had to change the logic to two particles, one for the arm and back and two for the flight between them.
I don’t know yet about the intermediate stage, before the launch itself, I was thinking of adding some kind of animation of the drones increasing, but for now it doesn’t work well, it’s probably easier to just launch them.
Worked on particle positions, now there is an active attack with sparcles and additional particles for smoke. All this is done in one Niagara, except for the last red sprite. Having worked a little with PAR, you can get a good result.
There is another task, so far I have not managed to make several drone launches, since the launch of particles is oriented to the last point in the trace, most likely you need to add an array accumulation in the blueprint with a Niagara and an impact point.
It’s funny, now you can see what the shader complexet will be at the end, of course, I will add a cutout and look at the number of particles, and I will try to scale some through the dot product to the camera.
Thank you very much for such a review, to be honest I always wanted to make such content, I always have a lot of ideas in my head, but no time for them. I’m glad you like it
I tried different options and for now I stopped at this one, I’ll try to implement it in Unreal tomorrow, most likely it won’t be a very simple task. Obviously I’ll need to think about the geometry so that I could add patterns with animation.
It was really fun to work on this, especially when I got the first result of electrical tracks on the character’s hand. At that moment I realized how harmoniously it fits with the hologram. I also started reworking the drones so that they first look at the camera and then at the target, well, their appearance, I think this model will be enough.
You can check YouTube if you want, the quality is better there. There are a lot of small details that their GIF doesn’t capture.
Today I worked with drones and updated their appearance and effects, and also worked a little with the beam when aiming at a target, but I’ll show that tomorrow.
I paid most attention to the Muzzles and some fog around the shots.
I decided not to bother with textures and try noises first. Muzzles are quite far from the player and any noise should work well. I tried several and one of the options gave good initial shapes.
Then I found a suitable reference for such shots, this reference from Star Trek. I needed additional smoke around the shots so that they would not look boring. I made simple 3D noise as they do for geometry, only I did not separate the noise with normals, this was enough.
Here I made it brighter and it works well, although at first glance in the material it clearly looks worse.
a test that I didn’t use, but just looked at how it would work if I made it a little more targeted.
I got the right shader for the smoke and texture, added flashes inside the smoke. For the big smoke I use the original 4k texture and reduced by 1 lod and for the small impacts reduced by 2 lods. I only use one texture for the smoke and normal.
For the first stage of the drone attack, this is the final. The next stage is the big explosion.
Maybe I will make small adjustments, increase the number of particles or reduce them, but nothing serious.
These are some textures I’m working on, I won’t be using them all and I have more to do for the final, just a process.
Making textures for smoke is always so long and not fun, it’s just a bottomless pit you waste your time in. Maybe it’s my attitude towards it, because you always want to get a better texture, and you try again, and maybe the next random will be better.
Sit all day with a cup of coffee or tea and some movie in the background, watch every voxel, composition, detail, speed, transparency. Render > compositing, (5 minutes) > send to engine > check for 5-10 minutes, speed, composition, in gameplay, smoke density and then again in a circle.
there is only one texture in the middle and one texture for the trails. I am currently using 4k downscaled to 2k in engine.
here are two identical textures with random rotation and scale
This is the final, finally I can breathe out and play a bit.
It was a long marathon, where I updated my tools, got some knowledge with blueprints. I also really enjoyed creating all this, at all stages. Honestly, I didn’t think that everything would work out, I expected that I would get stuck on blueprints so…
Awesome work! This turned out sooo good. From the elements of the player morphing to the drones to the last little bomb the drones throw to give the attack a good punch at the end, much to like here
