VFX Specialism
Project Brief
At the beginning of this project, I had zero experience with VFX in Unreal Engine. My goal was to create a seamless scene showcasing a gameplay ability (meteor attack) in this case. I also did my best to maintain a visually pleasing environment by creating numerous VFX for the surroundings.
The Making of Portal
To make the portal I approached it procedurally by diving it up in to 3 parts. Outer Circle, Portal Middle and debris. To achieve particles going away from the center of the circle I used negative values in a "point attraction force" node this pushes particles away from centre and to achieve tentacle like particles going out I used a combination of "curl noise force" and to make it rotate a simple "vortex velocity" did the job drag node also helped me to control the speed of particles rotating and moving.
Portal centre was quiet simple to make as it was just a mesh renderer with a circle from maya. I also created a custom material with a custom cube map from the second scene I have created
For the debris I modelled a very low poly rock in maya and then used it in a mesh renderer. A curl noise to randomise the behaviour of the rocks and a torus shape location to make the rock stick to a donut shape. I then added mesh orientation to rotate it in a circle and drag to control the speed. To finalise the effect I added a light renderer to every rock to illuminate their impact with the floor and the portal frame
Meteor Ability
For the meteor ability, it was simply a combination of different effects that were carefully timed on the timeline inside of Niagara to make it look smooth. Because the purpose of this project was to create a cinematic, I didn't go to the lengths of implementing a button to use this ability, and it was done through the sequencer.
I started off by creating the fire and smoke trail for the future meteor. I used a mesh renderer for the actual meteor and simply scaled a small rock to make it look like one. Then, I used an event handler to receive the position of the meteor and spawn the fire and smoke particles at that location. I also offset the meteor's position and added a gravity force to make it attract back to the point of origin.
Upon impact, I simulated smoke dispersing in all directions over a short duration of time, along with a large fire explosion that sent debris flying in all directions. I also used an event handler to obtain the positions of the debris and attach smoke to them.
In the end I spawned a decal at the location of meteor impact and some fire randomised on a place around the impact zone.
For the animation I used an animation montage and created a looping animation of the ability cast using premade animations from the marketplace
For this section I animatined the movement of fire by hand and keyframing every single frame. I was trying to make the niagara system to stick to the bones of the skeleton but i was unsuccessul with this and in result I had to animate by hand
