I haven’t posted in a while, but thought I’d share something I am doing in my spare time. I have wanted to get stuck into using the free paragon assets to create effects on actual characters which is something I have not tackled before. So here is the WIP of my lightning mage.
At the moment I am just blocking out when effects trigger and where via animations and blueprints. Got the hand effects, basic beam emitters and charge effect triggering in roughly the right places. Next steps is to fire off projectiles with trails, have them hit a target specified in BP and then the impact effect. Then I will go back over each element to make the effects as good as I possibly can and get all the timing polished.
As always, feel free to throw out ideas as to how I can make it better as I upload the progress, I learn so much from everyone here. At some point I will upload the behind the scenes stuff to see if others have better ways of doing things, but I’ll do that at the end
So tonights task was to create and implement custom splines, and move particle systems along them (something I have never done successfully). After much bashing my head into the keyboard I managed to get them in. I used the hand effects as a place holder just so I can see the particle component movement. All in all I am pretty happy as now I can move onto timings and curves and unique effects for each part of the spell.
So next I am either going to create a proper charge/burst effect for the spell, or I will work on the projectile particles, and then get some proper timing on the go
So… tackled the ribbon emitters for the projectiles tonight. I was a bit stumped as to how to do a lightning effect on a ribbon emitter, because as far I know you can’t use sprite sheets for them… but with a bit of mucking around, ended up with this…
Little bit of progress today… got a charge up effect in and the new trails…
Next I want to get a proper projectile in and work on randomizing the flickering of each trail. I also want to add a proper burst for the release of the charge and play about with some refraction on the charge and release.
Maybe you should pay attention to the projectiles from dragon age inquisition ?
Electric spells look very interesting there, and even though flickering happens all the time as they fly, they are always visible.
Dragon Age: Inquisition is exactly the game that is inspiring this mini project! I am definitely in the process of putting in more work for these effects, and the trails/projectiles are next on the list for me to focus on
