This will be my first ever entry in any sketch so far, so I’m really excited
Lately I’ve been experimenting with Grid2D and fluid sims in UE, so I guess this is a good opportunity to push myself and hopefully make it in time.
My idea is to recreate the Hiss effects from Control.
Since it’s a very complex system which is an artistic pillar of the game, my guess is they spent quite a bit more than a month to make it
So I will try my best to make it look as authentic and perform in a similar way on the tech side as much as I can, but certainly not going to be the actual thing guys at Remedy did for this effect.
Even if I don’t make it in time, it will still be a nice excuse to spend some time to learn new things
My ultimate goal is to make a working sequence which uses the levitating debris attack on some NPC, explosion + Hiss fluid sim like in this clip:
Still in a experimental phase, trying out different stuff. I’m still focusing on the fluid sim part.
At first I was trying to do it all with just particle position reading, but that wasn’t going to get me far. So I opted to use the gBuffer layers for sourcing. Still a lot of work to do, but it’s a start.
In this example I’m using custom depth to mask out what I need for sourcing the simulation, so the mesh and particles work without any separation. There is also some basic noise advection, chromatic aberation and desaturation filters.
Next on the list is to investigate how to use the velocity buffer to further advect the sim and a lot more tinkering
Ok, so might not look like much, but a lot has changed on the tech side for the Hiss part (and a lot more has to come to make it the real thing). So that’s the reason I haven’t posted anything in a month
Mainly, the fluid simulation part now uses forces for advection instead of noise and it is transfered to a Postprocess material instead of a camera locked quad since it caused some artifacts.
A lot of Renderdoc diving, trial and error, experiments and asking for help lead to the conclusion what is really needed for this effect to work correctly. I’ve partially done it, but still some issues to fix. The main headacke is ofc the depth reprojection to make the fluid be grounded in the world and not just slapped on the screen.
Issues can be seen while moving forwards / backwards, the ‘zooming’ of the texture doesn’t work, and also camera rotation on the edges of screen isn’t quite right. But I guess those 2 things are connected and the texture displacement isn’t correct. Currently there isn’t a separate Fluid depth mask, just using Scene depth for reprojection.
But anyway, I’m still going to continue working on this until I make it right. I want to understand the math behind this 100% and also polish the visuals as much as possible.
So, for now, I’ve put up a little demo with pickable projectiles and some placeholder enemies. Characters are from Mixamo and the environment is free on UE marketplace.
