Sent you a message privatily, thank you!
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Here’s some random experiments with the single mesh, storing pivot to UVs vertex shaders.
Incoming gif bomb 
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A very interesting attempt. I will wait for your next post!
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How do you actually make your watermark? 
Is there a gif app that does it automatically? 
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I use https://www.screentogif.com/
it’s great because you can edit the frames to get the proper looping and reduce size, sketch on it, add watermarks, scale edit etc and has a bunch of options for exporting. Definitely recommend it!
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If your gifs are still big, don’t hesitate to compress them on websites like Optimize animated GIF after the screen2gif export, it works pretty well and reduces the size drastically 
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Helllooo! So I just wanted to have some sort of a conclusion or closure to my experiments so I ended up making a Houdini Digital Asset to automatically fracture any mesh however you like and the pivot points are automatically baked into the UVs. No Texture is loaded and everything works great out of the box. I’m very proud of this because I had this theory and I practically applied it and made it work
The shader for the above gif.
Some other quick experiments trying out the workflow with the tool.
And here’s the Houdini Graph.
Spent all day trying various meshes in various orientations, sizes, rotations and everything works! 
!
I’m not fully happy with the HDA though, there’s a few things I want to try and I also want to look at automatic material creation (if I can even do that) so I can use python or some other scripting along with these to make a one click solution and use that for something else in the future.
For now, I’m tired and sleepy. I think I’m going to work on an FX next.
(Sorry for your bandwidth loss, I’ll look into optimizing my gifs next time D:)
I was pretty sloppy on the actual HDA itself. I can definitely add a lot of options for the fracturing, masking, weird sliders and parameters but I’ll save that for some other time.
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It’s so great! Thank for sharing!
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Souler Coasters? How about Souler Tentacles?
(noisy gif to reduce size)
Not much progress yesterday, just had an idea in mind and wanted to practice some more HDA development. Made a tangly bramble asset with proper UVs and a bunch of options.
Developed a tool to draw curves and make brambles/offshoots in engine.
Some parameters to control your asset.
The houdini graph (WIP)
I wanted to try the vertex colour options idea I had in mind.
I made an option to apply :
Random R channel per branch to use for the UV offset in the shader (shown in the above gif) or to collapse them to reduce overdraw.
and/or G channel fading out across the entire mesh (can use to mask either tip off or make rings on the branches)
and/or B channel noise across the mesh to help with alpha erosion to spawn it in/out.
All channels enabled together.
Also implemented an experimental detangle option that I still need to develop more. Helps a lot with weird collisions or strong options.
Speaking of, also implemented the ability for it to collide and grow around objects.
And the UVs are all nicely laid out, too. Should make an option to multiply them for more control.
Early screenshot of testing out interacting with obstacles.
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Just made my first full effect! Spent all day yesterday working on this.
Thanks to PowerAnze and bftd on the discord server for some critique and feedback
It’s inspired by Yrel from HOTS
Still looking for any and all feedback, please!
I think the slam is a bit too…crowded? Maybe it just has too much noise, might cut down on elements there.
I also need to polish the timings a lot.
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Nice effect… Fine and smooth…
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Made Soldier : 76’s biotic field today. Feeling very comfortable with cascade now.
also fixed my fps issues and made a video for this again
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Saw a pinterest post I can’t remember where someone made a custom depth ground crack thing in Unity, wanted to recreate it in UE4. I didn’t polish this because my approach is way too naive to use in actual games. I might get back to it later though. Thinking blueprints and rendertargets next time or something, dunno yet.
The shader for the cracks
The crack mesh in Blender.
I’m using a custom depth pass to render out the top cap. I wanna look into other approaches if there are any to get something more usable and cheaper for an effect I have planned.
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Have been studying since I woke up, gonna take a break for today and finish this in the next two days.
WIP, Johanna W ability from HoTS.
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The effect is quite simple, but because of the ideal timings, everything looks very cool 
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This is very cool, thanks for sharing!
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Thank you, that means a lot to me! I started off fawning over your work 
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Thanks, your work is great and very inspiring
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Managed to do a full effect in a day, pretty happy! Just gonna call it done, learned a lot.
My main focus for this study was to get more familiar with refraction since I couldn’t quite get it looking good.
I’m unhappy with the timings, there’s a lot more tightening to be done but I just want to move on and focus on other stuff for now. I feel like studies should be quick, to the point and focused. It’s working well for me and I feel like I’m getting better everyday instead of spending days tinkering the minutia of each emitter. I think focusing on the macro right now is better for me anyway
That being said, I definitely love doing that and get consumed by it so it’s very difficult to restrain myself and move on quick.
Another thing I’ve been doing is reading books and sketching effects everyday, I want to slowly start making original effects and I have sooo many sketches for all kinds of effects and sequences already. Super exciting and fun I really love doing this, I can’t believe I spent so much time being afraid of it and didn’t dive in sooner. It feels so natural and effortless to me and I’m happy with my progress so far.
Also slowly working on a level and set dressing it, it’s been going well so far and I’m super excited to use it for some effects in the future.
/ramble
Here’s the higher def video if anyone’s interested.
Still haven’t found ideal encoding/recording settings. Youtube destroys my videos too. Might have to try vimeo next.
(Gah, the primitive has faceting and it looks so bad, gonna fix it from the next effect onwards)
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I don’t know… the effect seems to me not bright enough. And the explosion doesn’t resemble shape of the effect.
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