Tech - Week Thirteen
The past week I have been working on furthering and refining the particle effects from the week before. Starting to use blueprint to add additional control to the particle systems and doing more cool things in the materials to create cheap but efficient effects.
From where I left off with the last blog post, I have been working on a carrier bag that flies around a set area in the Environment. It has some basic AI that means it is constantly looking what’s in front of it and if it’s about to collide with an object or escape the set area it changes direction and flies that way instead. As you can see working above. This is all done in the blueprint that is moving the particles system around, the particle system is rotating the mesh and the material is making the mesh flutter in the wind. Combined this is giving the finished result of the bag being able to fly around the environment.
Another particle effect that is being driven using blueprint is the wave splashes. I have made it so that the blueprint gives you a spline to draw in the level for which the particles are randomly spawned along.
The blueprint has variables that allow you to change the range of delay between the particles spawning and amount of particles that will spawn along the spine at each given execution. This gives a lot more control to the randomness of their spawning but still outputs a much more random chaotic result which is more believable than just controlling everything through cascade.
So as well as continuing to refine the fire and drips effects I have made some smaller effects to add life to the environment, ones that aren’t as noticeable as the carrier bag or wave splashes. Floating dust particles and buzzing flies are the other two I have made. The dust is really basic, but the flies are a little more interesting. I have used a technique that I used in other effects, manipulating the textures UV’s, to make the wings of the flies effectively beat rapidly. This has added another layer of movement to the particle without any real additional cost. To get this effect any other way you’d have to use a flipbook texture which means using larger texture size which I am trying to avoid. Here’s an example of how the material works:
The other particle effects:
I’m happy with where all the particles are at the moment, I may go back and do some polish at the end of the project, but for the next week I am going to be looking into changing how the Modular Building System works. With how it works at the moment, when you change the size of the building after setting up what walls and roof meshes it changes their location due to how it interoperates the array. Kit has asked if there is any chance of getting it working on a floor based system so that when you set what meshes are on each floor and then change how many floors there are it doesn’t move the meshes around. This is something I’m going to be researching into and explaining further after looking into it more after the next week or so.
