I added bubbles to the puddle! Here’s how it looks:
And here are a few closeup stills:
The particle system is very simple, it spawns the bubbles on a mesh and that’s pretty much it.
Since the VFX Graph places particles depending on the vertex density, the particle distribution was very uniform and boring, so instead I spawn the particles on this (ugly) mesh:
This way I can control which areas have more particles, as well as spawn particles at places covered by the decal but not by the actual puddle mesh.
It might not be the best way to handle this but it works, though if anyone has a better way of doing this I’d be very interested!
The bubbles’ shader does most of the work there, and mainly those two things:
- The “pop” at the end. I simply scale the bubble a bit on the Y axis and dissolve it using some noise. The pop factor is controlled from the VFX Graph itself.
- The movement applied to the bubbles to make them follow the surface of the puddle. For that, I sample the same 3D noise I used in the puddle shader at the particle’s position, and add this offset to the vertex position.
Also, my friend @Wallcoeur (check out his event thread!) suggested that I add some slight movement on the decal:
It really helps making it feel a bit more “alive”, but I’m not really fond of the way it kinda slides on the ground. I’ll leave it for now until I can (hopefully) think of something better, but if anyone has suggestions for that please tell me!
Next up, particles flying around!