Environmental ribbon fish and jellyfish particles I made for a student game project in UE 4.27.
All effects are not optimized yet. It was practically my first experience of using notorious ribbon emitters, and I am absolutely in love with nice natural movements that ribbons have.
I am a student and a humble VFX padawan, so I would be happy to get any points to improve my work.
would love to see a short breakdown of this! Are those emission materials on the meshes?
For the fish I used ribbons only. A ribbon emitter (Shape: Plane), I drew a texture in Photoshop:
In UE4.27 you can choose the shape in Ribbon Renderer. I chose Multi Plane:
In order to hide cross section of the tip, I added one more ribbon, the shape is Tube. I just changed Scale Ribbon Width to fit the shape of my fish texture:
In conclusion, I added one more ribbon trail and sparks:
The only thing which makes me nervous is optimization I will have to do later for the school project game.
For jelly I used two identical meshes for the top with WPO animation. It’s emissive, translucent, with panning noise, and with fresnel. It took a lot of time to make the shader which looks good.
For tentacles I made spark sprites placed in a ring. The radius expands and shrinks with sine wave and with the same period as the top with WPO. These ring sprites generate location event for ribbon tentacles. The ribbons have curl noise:
And I again added a ribbon trail with a panning texture and sparks:
Added some environment:
