One Candle to Rule Them All
I worked on a project testing out an idea of creating a candle. Building on this idea I ended up kitbashing the world of Diablo and Zelda and I wanted to share a little on some of the effects that I did.
The Candle
With pretty much all effects, I like to start with reference and recently adopted a tool in my arsenal called PureRef and gathered real life examples to make my candle. There are a lot of directions you can go with even a simple effect like this, so it helps to think about the art direction, or style you want. Since I was just learning, I leaned on some YouTube videos for guidance.
First I modeled the 3D asset in Blender. In addition to the candle itself I added an extra card to be reused later as the flame in its own material slot. One of the goals with creating a candle was to be able to mass produce them and the foilage tool was a great way to do just that. Thanks to Ghislain Girardot for showing me the workflow. Using Alexey Fedorov guidance, I was able to create effective materials for the wax, wick and flame which made use of subsurface scattering.
The Spiders
I wanted to practice the skill of building crowds and what better creature to put in a cave than a spider? So I grabbed a free asset off CG thanks to Vladislav Simakov. Now the interesting part most VFX Artists know when it comes to animated meshes that need to be mass produced: Vertex Animation Texture (VAT). I have had experience in the past using VAT in Houdini but in an attempt to keep my toolset free, I wanted to work out of Blender. Thankfully Ash Oakenfold put together some great resources so we don’t need to code anything— but for some reason his video is private so I’ll share his workflow here.
Once a single spider is imported into your game engine, setting up the VAT material along with it’s particle system is fairly straight forward. This technique can be applied to virtually any mesh that you want to animate in bulk (birds, rats, fish oh my!) Thilina Premasiri did a great tutorial you can check out here.
The Gloom
I’ve been playing a lot of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and as I was doing this effect, I thought it would be cool to recreate the gloom that we see around the world. Turns out, there’s different types of gloom created so I tackled two in this project that I named them “mist” and “geyser”. You’ll notice that the mist can be more of a soft / transparent style OR a hard and defined style depending on where it is in the game. To get the color scheme I wanted, I ended up using a color atlas in the material editor and texture painted my values in photoshop.
The Blood
Finally the blood is done using a tutorial from Ashif Ali and I LOVE how he setups up the fake lighting in the material editor to give that glossy feel to it. As for the floating blood above, it’s actually a really cool effect presented by Sem Schreuder that I tweaked. Probably not performant efficient, but a fun chance to play with curl noises and vector fields.
Overall, this sequence was challenging and rewarding to make because it gave me a chance to be creative with my own vision and develop VFX skills and other adjacent awareness in the video game pipeline including cinematography.
Add Particle Impacts to Physical Materials
Every once in a while I run into a problem where there isn’t a clear solution available to the public. Has that happened to you?
You spend countless hours scrounging the web for a holy answer that is going to magically fix the issue you are facing with an effect. Sometimes you luck out and find the information buried deep in an obscure comment 10+ years ago. But more than likely you’ve ended up figuring out the solution on your own or have given up entirely.
I’m a visionary. I see things in my head and believe anything is possible. So when I run into technical limitations during my effect making process it drives be BONKERS! But any good VFX artist knows the #1 skill you must possess is good problem solving. This was clearly evidenced in my R&D for a viable way for artists to hook their effects in game for a particular idea I had one day.
What if we could dynamically generate a plethora of different elemental impact particle systems based on the surface we were hitting with our weapon of choice?
This set me on the path to take bits and pieces from others frustrations, compile them (them shaders am I right?) into a single packaged design, and execute flawlessly. But surely I wasn’t the only one who had asked this question? Why keep it in-house when I could spread the knowledge with others tackling the same issue…
And there you have it— I created my first tutorial.
“Adding Particle Impacts to Physical Materials” aptly named, focuses on the VFX artist wishing to implement their effects through Unreal Engine 4’s Blueprints. I had broken the tutorial into 3 major parts because there was a lot of new concepts we are not normally introduced to:
Physical Materials
Input commands
Trigger conditions
Blueprints are complicated asf. I always applaud technical artists and programmers for understanding the complexity of C# and beyond. Learning new languages are not for the faint of heart. They say even veteran coders still use Google as if it were their best friend. Anyway…
In addition to spawning just particle systems, my tutorial briefly covers destructible and physics interactions with skeletal meshes. It’s really a great piece to learn a thing or two about game development & puts a lot of power in a VFX artist hands.
Of course this probably isn’t the ONLY way to achieve the desired results, but it’s one way to be sure! Good luck and rock on. :)
-TDM