BA2B - Particle Effect - Week 3

Alongside the many other things I've had to do this week, particle effects was one of the tougher challenges due to having small amounts of experience with it. The only things I knew was how to create a simple effect let alone what the team wanted. They wanted something along the lines of a healing circle, instead promoting heaven and hell. I first started off this process of taking ideas from games like Diablo 3 and Baulders gate dark alliance, two games which I know relate around the idea of magic and heaven and hell. Showcased below are two examples of the sorts of particle effects I wanted.



These images helped me to get a understanding of the sorts of basic concepts I want for the game, nothing too major in the forms of graphics memory or computer processing memory but enough to be able to give off the illusion of someone going to heaven or someone going to hell. I then looked into Diablo 3 and how they generated their effects and found the exact thing I wanted.



This image is exactly what I wanted. Something that lies in the Z co-ordinate, that is flat but also has a effect of light going upwards or downwards dependent on heaven or hell. The idea behind this was to create a basic PNG in photoshop something with enough detail in it to represent the idea of a healing circle. Creating something this level is easy as it's just basic shapes. The image below is the image I chose to use, I had to make it black and white for when you put it into UE4 particle system the black deletes itself and you can change the color of the white.

After creating the PNG I then made a material putting both the image and a particle color then multiplying them together with the emmisive and opacity channels. Then changing the blend mode to translucent and the shading model to unlit to be able to see the material more clearly and get rid of the black background. After this step it was very easy to create the emitter for the actual PNG image. The idea was to have it spinning the same as Baulder Gate Dark Alliance along with some bubbles coming out of it to make it look like they're floating up to heaven. The bubbles were easy, just a gradient with the same process to create a ball looking material and having it with a high set spawn rate alongside other simplistic nodes allowing for me to understand it and learn from it. This allowed me to get more of a understanding of how these particle effects work by doing a simply formed effect. Shown on the left are the exact Emitters and nodes used to create the effects. 

I then done the same process for the hell version of the particle effect with a different PNG. This helped my knowledge of particle effects grow drastically but also having the information learned before helped me retain my sanity and not confusing myself along the way. 

GIF Link: End product - https://gyazo.com/ce22618f96090ca40cf432d2c38d13b7