I’m really curious as to how you made Swain’s spell appear as if it was coming from underground without it being occluded by the floor plane. I know how I would set it up with Unreal’s materials, but I’m curious about the techniques you applied with your engine. From what little I’ve heard, your shaders tend to be pretty straight forward and low cost to keep everything running fast
It looks to me like like the sphere is masked by the outer ring- so as the sphere raises it gives the illusion of depth. Plus there is a semi-opaque layer which the sphere “breaks through” to reveal it’s full color. The sphere appears slightly blurry “below” the ground and once it breaks the surface it comes into full sharpness.
Great work Nate! Where are some of your favorite places to gather reference/inspiration?
@Travis hit the nail on the head! Did a little breakdown to help show that. The one thing that is sorta not that great is the wasted UV space in my texture. Ideally you use the entire UV space, and offset to achieve a similar effect, but this gets the job done. The texture scrolling is keyed in the particle editor to achieve the slow down and speed up effect at the start.
We have stencils, aka particle masks, that allow us to specify a mesh that acts as a render mask for any particles assigned to that stencil. In this case I used a circle mesh that masked the eye and the “walls” of the hole. All the masked particles are also set to render above terrain.
Also fun fact, there are 2 eyes. One eye that is masked by my circular stencil to help make it below ground. The other eye needed to move above the actual ground stencil mask because I wanted it to float above fairly high. You can see a bit of a jitter right as the eye reaches ground level… this is me swapping to another eye (which I made brighter to mimic it coming through a barrier).
Thank you so much ^^. I didn’t have a specific place for reference but gathered from a wide variety of sources. For example on Swain I was constantly looping pentakill, and referencing anime like Helsing xD
That’s awesome! My first guess, or how I would have tried it in Unreal was keying the orb’s parallax depth and then hide the flat “rising” sphere with particles as I transitioned to the final geo sphere eye
Hey Alecei! That sounds super cool! I could totally imagine a version of this where she pushes a bunch of energy into the enemy instead of outward and then she pulls that energy into her as she consumes their souls .
Ahh haha. Yeah… I’m not too crazy about it. This is something that Katarina had in her kit to indicate that she got a reset on her R (she gets a reset if she gets a kill), and we ultimately decided to keep that as part of her update. Looking at it now I can imagine different ways to do this so that it reads better and is more thematically relevant xD
Hey, amazing particle you’re making
So, why all area particles have an emissive color with a black border? Also, is this a default shader to contrast with the particle or is this just part of the texture?
Why black around the edge of the Galio swirl texture? I used an additive blend mode which will disregard the black parts of a texture. The green checker is just to demonstrate the UV’s . Let me know if that answers your question!
Not just the Galio, but I can see in every particle a kind of black aura contrasting with the additive from the particle. I’m making some VFX for a game and I want them to be visible in a white background so they can’t be fully additive. This black could be the solution to this problem, So I want to know if it’s a shader or just a black texture.
Adding non-additive elements behind an additive one defenitely helps when a particle has to play in a lighter environemnt. You can also use a blend-add method that is a combo of both.
My first guess, or how I would have tried it in Unreal was keying the orb’s parallax depth and then hide the flat “rising” sphere with particles as I transitioned to the final geo sphere eye
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