Jake's Sketchbook

Hey everyone! I’ve been working on some effects for some time and wanted to start my own little Sketchbook on here. I’ve been lurking this community for a few months now and I’ve learned a ton so far but there is still more I can learn and I welcome any and all feedback from this community.

The issue I’ve been dealing with lately is my blaster effect shown in this video.
https://youtu.be/t6OIIZbLwxM
One of the issues you can see is that the effect does not line up properly with the path of the projectile.
Another issue is that the effect itself does not remain attached to the end of the gun.
I’ve attached a screenshot of the guns blueprint.


I’ve played with both the “Spawn Emitter Attached” and the “Spawn Emitter at Location” modules and the latter seems to have gotten me closer to the desired goal but I’m probably missing something.

The original blueprint for the weapon comes from the Shooter Tutorial series by Ryan Laley who has some fantastic tutorials for creating weapon blueprint classes. The effect spawning is my own addition to his blueprints that I’ve tried to hammer into the process. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsS5i15vvUbwfr_1JdRKCAA/playlists

Any critique or feedback is welcome on this!

4 Likes

Hey Jake, nice effect so far!
regarding your blueprint issue, have you tried setting your particle to local space?
that’s what you’d want to do for most solid elements.

also try using ‘Spawn Emitter attached’ and setting the location type to ‘snap to target’.

Finally regarding your weapon/projectile offset, this is probably a linetracing issue.
It may help rotating your particle towards the forward vector of that linetrace.

Goodluck :wink:

I don’t know much of blueprints sorry but, regarding the effect, i think the timing is nice although the payoff disappears way too fast for me, too abrupt, try giving the ring (the one on the gun when it shoots) more lifetime and a better fadeoff, make it go to black in color over life (transparent).

Thanks for the compliment. As far as setting the particles to local space, I did go through and made sure the box was checked but I’ll go through them again to see if I missed one.

I’ve tried using the Spawn Emitter Attached and setting the location type to snap to target but it gives me odd results so I think I might be missing something else in the set up there.

Regarding the linetrace, I havent thought of that so I’ll give that a shot once I get some time away from my other projects. Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestions! I’ll go back and tweak it some more once I get the spawing issue sorted out. Im also wondering if the effect is too large considering how close it is to the camera, so any tips and tricks regarding that is appreciated as well.

That’s a good question, but size and usually the intensity of your effect depends on the gameplay mechanics involved. ask yourself this: is this a special power up shot, or maybe a power shot but more common, or is it a repeating muzzle flash?. You scale it according to the gameplay impact this mechanic/effect has.

Blaster Effect Ver2 WIP
Not sure why there is no video preview for the link so apologies if it doesnt show up

Update on the effect so far. Its been awhile since I’ve had time to work on it since my contracting duties are keeping me fairly busy. Thanks to everyone for their advice and critique so far. In the previous version, using Spawn Emitter attached worked like a charm though I was still unable to get the effect to line up with the actual projectile.

So I realized I was spending too much time trying to figure out something that wasn’t necessary for the time being.
Since this effect is going to be for a portfolio piece, I’ll save the attachment to the weapon for later and focus on getting the core bits of it figured out first.

Branxord gave some excellent advice about the payoff disappearing too quickly, which led me to an idea to try.
Giving the ring some movement after it fires would help sell the idea that there is some force applied to the projectile.
I’ve been playing around with world position offset and so far the results been unsatisfactory. I feel I’m close, though or at least on the right path.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for humoring my long-windedness. The effect shown has been stripped down and rebuilt after following some guidelines on materials and optimization. The current parts I’m working on are colored in blue and white for the time being to help single out which effects I’m currently working on fixing.

I’ve researched possibly using the vector noise node to help drive the WPO, but I don’t think I know enough about it yet to confidently implement it so if anyone has suggestings I’m all ears.