Shannon McSheehan - LoL FX + Knowledge Share

@MetaZ Here is more info about how Senna E waves and W wave forms were made. Please let me know if you have any other questions :smiley: It was fun to go back and revisit the effect

So for Senna E waves, here is the mesh! There are bumps in the mesh itself but also distortions on the UV’s themselves to help when the wave texture moves over the mesh feel like it’s pushing and pinching in the right areas to emphasize the motion.
image
I have the mesh rotating randomly 360 degrees when it spawns to break up the repetition. Similarly I have the UV’s shrunk so that the mult texture goes cleanly over the whole UV during it’s lifetime.

Here is that mesh with this image suuuuper small lined texture scrolling over it. Any smaller and it looked a little too fuzzy with compression. Already looks kinda trippy. As my husband just said AH MY EYES :slight_smile: I slowed the spawn rate down so you could see what just one mesh looked like.
Sberke_Senna_E_waves_01
image
You might notice that the lines aren’t scrolling linearly across the mesh, nor does the UV scale stay uniform. I’m changing those values over it’s lifetime to the values above. I have the values stay static after .6 seconds because I will also add an erosion and a mult. It was too much movement also having the UV scroll and scale still zoomin :smiley:

Also ya I totally can see the seam :grimacing: BUT again I knew I was going to add other textures so it wasn’t worth it at this stage to spend a bunch of time noodling with trying to get it perfect.

NEXT I added an alpha erosion. I eroded the line texture with this circle texture image
Sberke_Senna_E_waves_02
The lines with the circle erode are on the left, the circle texture that I’m using to erode the lines is on the right. Trippy right? :smiley: You can get some really cool looks with circles over squiggly UV’s like this.

Okay now that I had an erosion dissipation I wanted, the lines were just TOO MUCH detail for the eyes. I multiplied this texture over the lines: image
Sberke_Senna_E_waves_03 Sberke_Senna_E_waves_04
So the left is what that squiggly texture looks like by itself on the mesh. that’s what we’re going to scroll across the mesh over it’s lifetime as a multiply. The right side gif is that same texture set up as a multiply with NO scroll speed.

And now that same mult texture WITH scroll!
Sberke_Senna_E_waves_05

And now at the spawn rate I actually have in the ability itself ~
Sberke_Senna_E_waves_06

I do find it fun to look at. It kind of makes a weeoo weeoo sound to me in my head as it goes haha. Here it is with color! I start with blue which turns into pink over it’s lifetime.
Sberke_Senna_E_waves_07

All together ~ (I retimed the emitter life so that it could be a shorter gif)
Sberke_Senna_E_waves_08

I’ll make a separate post here about the wave forms, this ended up being a lot longer than I though haha.

@Lush Wellllll in some cases it just looks like butts tbh. Quads render over each other if a player makes 180 turns really fast. Additive render mode will especially be noticeable as the quads with render over each other and look noticeably brighter. The tools that LoL has does have some options to try and mitigate the overlap though. An awesome engineer gave us two different smoothing options for longer trails to either smooth from back or smooth from front. It takes into consideration the orientation of whichever you specify and tries to smooth/math out a less jarring orientation over the lifetime of the trail. You can get some nice results but with shorter life trails it often looks a bit janky as it’s trying to orient only a few quads.

There is also an option to factor in quad density to player speed. So if a player is moving faster more quads are drawn. That CAN be tricky of course because if a player say…teleports (which in LoL moves a character from one location to another. Can be a very large distance) if an artist forgets to specify a trail cap cutoff then that has caused hitching in the past haha 5 million quads! . :sweat_smile: Because of that there was a property for max trail cuttoff distance added as well as max spawn rate. Sometimes you gotta learn the hard way. :joy:

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