Hey all, this is my first post here as a memeber, I’ve been lurking for a long time. I’ve been in the games industry for a really long time and as an artist have served as environment artist, VFX artist, UI artist, generalist, Principal artist, Art manager, Art Director, etc., across AAA to indie to mobile and VR.
My most recent gig was a small indie studio that ran out of funding before we could go into early access and though I technically served as art director, there were only two artists including me on the core team and our vendors. But, one of the several areas I took complete ownership of was our VFX. It’s very possible that none of the stuff I’m sharing is new to this community or maybe not even interesting, but I thought it was a pretty successful strategy for our game.
The bulk of the work was focused on our combat effects and we had a need for potentially thousands of unique variants of projectiles, AOE’s, buffs and debuffs, impacts, etc. So I came up with a modular approach in UE5 (5.3 is where we ended for reference) that would allow for rapid scaling and content variation without the time and monetary cost of a traditional workflow. So, using AOE’s as an example category, I broke down what an AOE typically needed to be in our game into X-number of component types. Within each component type, I authored multiple Niagara system variations with each variation sharing a set of user parameters that would hook into data tables later. These params would typically control things like linear color, scale, duration, etc., as well as sometime some specific params associated with what that particular component type needed to do (for instance an initiation flash\burst might have params that a ground eruption wouldn’t and vice versa). Once this “library” of Niagara systems was created and they were hooked into data tables to describe and control their component type designation, the assembly of a full effect would then happen soley in the tables, with params being adjusted there.
In my Artstation I made some slides to do a breakdown of one of these assemblies and some of its individual components and some of the material and Niagara work I did as well. I picked this “Ice Pool” to showcase because it used some of the more complicated Niagara systems and material graphs I had to create. Since I’m a new user here, I can only imbed a single item so if you want to go to my Art Station to see the full breakdown of how I did our modular projectiles system as well as seeing it all in action in game play and screen captures of each assembly, please do!
