Hi! I am finishing up this frost attack grenade thingy. Just throw it on a couple of enemies, watch them freeze and subsequently explode into lots of pieces. I wanted to get a deeper understanding of Blueprints and improve my ability to implement my own effects into functioning attacks.
I should also credit my friend Jona Marklund for the character: https://www.artstation.com/jona
As I said, finishing up… However I wouldn’t want to call it completely done before consulting the community about it so feedback is very welcome! I’ll post a breakdown soon here aswell should anyone be interested 
Breakdown:
The freeze material:
Starting off, the material takes in a vector3 representing the position in WS of the grenade when it explodes. This location is subtracted with the position of the pixels of the mesh to get a vector from the lobster to the explosion. This vector is then dotted with the vertex normals to get which side of the mesh is facing away from the blast. This is now the alpha used for most parts of the material.
The “icicles” on the back of the mesh is made by multiplying a noise with the directional mask we just made, pushing the vertices outwards. The downside to this is that the extruded ice lacks angle corrected normals, but when everything explodes, it’s hard to notice.
The material is too big to fit in an image, so here’s a render: FreezeMaterial posted by anonymous | blueprintUE | PasteBin For Unreal Engine
Also, since BlueprintUE usually is for blueprints, it’s pretty lackluster with no colors for the nodes… You can of course paste the code in Unreal to see it properly.
Moving the “Grenade” around.
Scaling the global multiplier up and down. This parameter is usually controlled by a timeline param in the lobster’s blueprint, triggering when it is within the grenade’s hit radius.
Angry Ice Sphere:
It’s made of two noise textures panning on top of each other in the vertex and emissive channels. It’s size and the amount of vertex offset is controlled by a blueprint containing it and the particle systems.
Throwable blueprint:
The main take away of this blueprint is that it makes a sphere trace from the point of the explosion. If an actor gets hit by the sphere trace, a custom event is cast to the hit actors.
Freezable character blueprint:
- Starts the animation at a random fram to avoid synced idle anims.
- If it was hit, the aforementioned custom event is called which slows down the anim to a halt and scales up the freeze effect.
- Switch to the destructible and apply an impulse at the grenade’s location which makes the pieces go flying.
VFX Blueprint
This blueprint is spawned after the grenade bursts open. It triggers the build up particle effect and the explosion. The unstable ice crystal at the center is also animated here.
Okay so that is pretty much it Incase anyone would actually go in and look at the blueprints, please point out anything that’s wrong or could be done better, i’m still learning the ropes of blueprint.
The directional icicles are great touch!