very satisfying to watch on loop and this iteration you made is even more impressive
these are the additions i could see attempting
- water highlighting around mountain
- lava flow
- steam column
very satisfying to watch on loop and this iteration you made is even more impressive
these are the additions i could see attempting
@Torbach thank you so much for your feedback! <3
Update
Feedback/Todo:
I like your volcanic lightning. In my opinion: you could make the lightning darker and more saturated for a stronger contrast.
I’ll call this done. Could improve more but I need to finish it, document the texture creation and then give the talk.
New
Closer:
Working on a small effect for a class I’ll give soon. The idea is to have a relatively simple material/shader (mainly uv distortion + alpha erosion) and still get somewhat complex motion:
A new version. All elements (sphere, ring, smoke, fire, drips, puddle) use the same shader. The drips & circle are inspired by Alex Fedorov: Sketch #20 WIP @AlexFedorov
preview:
Here are some more small effect using the same shader (see above). The idea is to be able to create many different effects (projectile trails, collectible glare, scifi barriers, …) with the same shader.
I find it hard to believe the waterfall and the fireball (or is a fire wisp?) are using the same shader, really interesting stuff there.
I can see this is some sort of continuation to your “How to not create textures” talk.
Thank you for sharing these.
I’m a newbie so if you’d allow me to ask: how is that fire projectile making that smooth up and down motion? Is it some ribbon magic, or something else?
Hi
The “secret” of the projectile is a sine-shaped texture and a trail which is thin at the start and then quickly scales to it’s defined width. The principle is basically the same like here for the angel wings: sine texture on a plane where one part is scaled down → nice wiggly motion (Diablo 3 – Wings of Angels | Simon schreibt.)
In addition the trail uses UV distortion BUT
Simon, I’m studying what you did in there and it’s a really amazing resource to learn! I’m VERY grateful for these files.
I’ve a question regarding LUT coloring and another regarding dynamic parameters.
(EDIT) Ok just as I finished typing this I figured you don’t want to map your texture to the particle age, what you’re doing is basically a color remap (duh), and I don’t see how that would be possible in the niagara system itself.
I’ve no industry experience (YET!) so I’m just looking to learn the workflows from the pros, and sorry for the long post.
Hi,
thanks for your interest and the questions!
Yes, my coloring is a bit more complex by using a LUT BUT I multiply the LUT result also by the particle color. So a simple “color over time” is possible as well as a LUT * color over Time. During the class I also explained that I’d use a Curve Atlas in Unreal because then you can edit your “lut” in Unreal instead of saving/reloading textures all the time but the students used a custom engine without the ability for Curves/Curve Atlas so I showed tha “traditional” approach.
Yes, you’re totally correct using a dyn param because it allows you way more control. In my case, I knew I only need a linear interpolation (instead of custom values via curve) and so the setup is a bit easier because in Niagara you don’t need to setup anything. Just setting the checkbox for UV Distortion over Time in the Material is enough and it just works. But yes, for more control a custom parameter is nice. But here I tried to keep it as simple as possible.
Hope that helped!
Stencil Buffer Test with a small extra detail: Elements can leave the stencil area.
This is done by adding everything in front of the card to the stencil mask. For this to work I store pos + front facing vector via Blueprint:
In the material I then mask out the front/back area of the card with a simple dot product:
Little list of inspirations for later:
Dragon Breath:
Some more tests.
The hole in the ground uses several ingrediants:
I also played around with Unreal Geometry Script & Blender Geometry nodes. Summary: It’s cool but generating good UVs is almost impossible with Unreal Geometry Script (or I missed the some nodes).
In Blender it’s cool (but also a bit complicated) like in Houdini but the actual annoying part: The UVs are not directly saved into the mesh. This means I need to convert my spline (from which all geo is generated) into a mesh, manually copy my uv attribute into a uv map and only then i can export. This is a bit annoying.
Below an example of how to convert a spline into a nice border mesh for my card.
Test with adding a swoosh while rotating the card:
The effect is a simple bulgy cylinder with a scrolling texture:
For someone learning this thread is invaluable, thank you Simon!
Can you talk a little bit more about the depth test? I had a lot of problems!