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
