I am late with this challenge but I’ll try to do it anyway as I never did a lootbox vfx so this is a good opportunity!
I will go on something straightforward, nothing fancy in modelization or animation. I like the simplicity of the lootbox animation in League of Legends so I will try to do it my way on Unreal Engine
I also had to make some changes to the base model because it wasn’t ready for the animation and there wasn’t the cube with more holes so I did it… Painfully but I did it
The topology is not great but it’s enough for what I want to do
Animation is almost ready! I decided to make a lot of squash and stretch because… well… it’s just funnier this way and I don’t want to replicate exactly the League of Legends reference. I also thought about doing an opening with the loot going up in the air like in Overwatch!
As I said earlier, I didn’t want to make a proper texturing on the model so I used a World-Aligned Texture to make some variations in the box’s colors. The problem is that this texture stayed world space when the box was moving like in the GIF below
I added a Pre-Skinned Local Position with a Vertex Interpolator as input in the World Position Vector of the World-Aligned Texture to fix this.
Hey! I tried something fun with the opening of the box: I wanted to make the loot go up in the air like in Overwatch and I was like “Oh, why go in the air when you can go TO SPACE!”
So I made this and it was pretty fun to do! I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do now that the loot is up there, maybe a burst like in Genshin Impact to show if the loot is rare, epic or legendary and then the loot goes back on the ground. Actually, I don’t really know so don’t hesitate if you have any idea I would be glad to hear it haha! Maybe I can do something with the constellations too, that would be nice
Of course, all the trail is WIP, I think I will make it look a bit like the one in the Star Guardian ost video. That would be a nice reference to the League of Legends universe
Actually, the best quality video I have for the moment is this one above but you can wait for the end of the challenge (October 31st) before saving for reference as it’s still WIP
I didn’t use a mesh for the constellation, I placed the sparkles in local space by hand so I had to tweak their X and Y position. Once placed, I made simple sprites with full opacity, starting from each of these locations. I rotated them to the next star and scaled them on their X axis so that it created this thin lines
I’m almost there, I still need to make some final touches here to say it’s finished but I love this new direction like “When League of Legends meets Genshin Impact”
The flash at 0:07 leaves too quickly and leaves almost no residual effect. I suggest smoothening that out so it blends well. Consider using a dolly zoom to create a more pulsating effect.
Do you use a mesh for the constellation?
