Hello everyone. While I have time, I decided to take on a new task.
Some time ago, I gained quite a lot of experience in creating lightning, I studied this issue and options for creating electricity for a long time. I did this on Unreal Engine 4. At that time, there were no GPU ribos, so creating lightning in this way was quite resource-intensive. And in general, I think that this is not the best way now. The big plus in this is interactivity and variability.
Then I turned to Houdini, this is my favorite software and then it helped me out. I had 3 options, vertex animation, static mesh and sprites.
Vertex animation proved to be the best way, although now I have managed to implement the approach only on a static mesh.
Of course, using geometry for lightning, you get one big problem, this is the geometry antialiasing, which at a distance looks like a large artifact. I will try to show what I got and how it can be fix.
In this project I’ll try to use everything except vertex animation.
Current result
The beginning of my work
Of course my reference will be Black Myth: Wukong, I think this game has the best lightning I’ve ever seen.
Just for testing a couple of lightning variants and final material setup for geometry.
Also had to update my lightning setup in houdini a bit.
These are procedural lightnings where only geometry is used and there is no vertex animation.
Added some little things on the floor, slightly corrected some things in the composition and the number of lightning bolts. Added a general wave in the middle with big noise, I don’t know yet, it seems to be fine.
I want to say that I will not add lightning bolts anymore, but it seems that I can’t be stopped…
I really want to take up the glow, today when I added glow to small things on the floor, it immediately became better.
Tomorrow I think that I will finally take up the decal, we’ll see what happens. And then more lightning, a lot more needs to be added.
Now I use only geometry and sprites, and for sprites I use not even Alpha composite or Additive, but Masked Material for sprites and some Meshes.
Sprites are primarily particles that don’t require volume and encompass the finer details.
Before starting work on this task, I spent one day researching ribbons. The first results were good, but when I thought about having 10 tracks with lightning, the ribbons were outputting 200-500 particles. I realized that could get expensive, as my scene will have a lot of elements, and if I want to use more ribbons, it could get too much.
I haven’t added sparks to the effect yet, but I plan to include them. I’m already thinking about how I can reduce their number to avoid increasing the particle count too much. I also plan to work on the character, so I’m trying not to go overboard with the particles.
When thinking about optimization, if this effect were something the character uses constantly, it would be expensive. However, if there are no other effects in the scene, like in a solo run or boss fight with a mostly empty environment, it makes sense to overload the effect with particles. Looking at the boss fight in Wukong, they used a lot of particles, but the location was almost empty with no other NPCs, so I think it’s normal that I have it now, but I would not include the ribons here.
For my effect, this is the number of particles so far
