I haven’t made a sword trail before and haven’t had much time this month.
But looking at all the entries I wanted to give it a bash anyway, so I will be throwing together something a bit ad-hoc as i figure out the intricacies of the effect.
An attempt based off and inspired by the awesome effects that @Niels has been uploading.
One thing that could be worth a try is masking off the sides ever so slightly using your noise. I find it distracting that the sides have straight perfectly cut of lines in an otherwise quite organic looking effect.
I have masked the top and bottom of the trail and added subtle mask on the left edge.
Toward and at the end of the trails’ lifetime, I want to have the effect sort of erode away rather than squash in on itself.
Would it be best to do an alpha erode driven by a dynamic parameter? Or set up a little bit of “disintegrate” logic (the use of If nodes) in the trails material graph, which will also be driven by the dynamic parameter?
I will probably try both of these anyway to see what results they yield, but would be interesting to know the thoughts of others.
I am using UE4.
I am fairly inexperienced when it comes to all this, but for my entry I increased the lifetime of the trail and used alpha erosion driven by a dynamic parameter to stop the ‘Catch up’ issue… I was pretty happy with how it turned out anyways
Post up your result when you do it, intrigued to see how it will look!
So this is as far as i got. The look of my flame changed somehow, i think due to me adding in a couple more textures.
I know the challenge is over, but figured I would still post where I am at.
I learnt that i can get carried away with my materials and it ends up becoming a mess, haha.
I also lost the soft drop off of the flame somewhere along the line, so will be looking into fixing that and making other improvements as I attempt other swipe styles.
