The Continuation - Need to do more

 So Considering i didnt get the full mark i wanted and been given more time to create more effects to get it to where it needs to be, my aim is to create more unique effects, and to do this i have spent this past week researching effects to see what i could add onto, from this my plan is to learn from some videos then tranfer those skills and effect into my own effects. As it had been a small break between finishing the project and starting back up again i will be asking around for ideas from people to give me more unique ideas as otherwise ill just be doing what i did before, which wont work out.

So, The Effects i have made:

- Anvil Sparks

- A Disintegration Effect (Based on a tutorial i found interesting)

- Healing icon

- Ligntning Material

- Meator Explosion (Fully self made (Except for mesh))

-Sheild

-Tornado

-

Now the rest of the blog will be used to breakdown/showcase the effects i have made with the idea thats its all in one place (Bar the videos that i will have to figure out) 

Anvil Sparks:

The process to making the anvil sparks was both a simple one but complex as I had to figure out how to make it look like it was coming from a centre point that wasn’t one spot but like a cube, as with anvil sparks it comes from hitting an object.

To do this I created the blueprint aspect first using a basic cube and a model hammer I had made a while ago setting up the timeline of the hammer to hit the cube every few seconds to create the anvil hammer.

Moving onto the sparks, this was created using initially a fountain effect, put changing the velocity from linear to from a point made the sparks move outwards instead of upwards. With this set up I change the effect shape location to a cube that was immediately shrunk to fit something that would go on an anvil, eventually setting on a size of 5, 5, 20 (compared to the initial start of 100, 100, 100)

The main change made to the original fountain blueprint is adding a curl noise force, and a apply initial forces

The main purpose of the curl noise force is to make the particle movement more unique and random so that there isn’t a consistent arch for the effect whilst also using the apply initial forces to affect how far it moves.

Following this was adding the colours, I initially set it to orange setting the R, past the base limit of one to create a more vibrant colour. However, looking at footage of actual anvil sparks, they disappear really quickly, so using the scale colour I’m able to make the effect fade to nothing to create the similar effect.

Finally, I added collision so that the particle wouldn’t go through the floor if it reached that far, the once downside to this is that some particles have the habit of sliding on the floor, but it’s only one particle most of the time.

A Disintegration Effect

From the offset I will say this isn’t my effect as I had no clue how to make this but during my research for other effects to make I came across this one and wanted to attempt to make it for this project so used the tutorial with a different mesh, and due to the outcome it is different from the original video but from my tests that’s down to the mesh that was used as in the video when using vertices points it maintains its shape, for me it broke the mesh so I switched to bones and skeleton making it have the a few points around the edge so didn’t maintain the full effect so it looks different. However, I will explain the process for making it as best as possible as it may not be original, I am happy with the results.

To create the effect the main thing that was needed the skeletal mesh for the particles to copy the outline of, to do this I added a sample skeletal mesh and skeletal mesh location to place the mesh within the effect, and under the sampling section of each section I set the sampling type to bones and sockets on both as any other option would leave the effect broken as it would only do one to 2 sections of the mesh.

From this I added a curl noise force to move the particle away from the starting point in unique ways creating the disintegration effect, however with the point attraction force, in theory it should go back to the original way it looked, however for me I preferred it to stay spread out so left it weak so that the particles didn’t travel too far but didn’t go back to the original place either.

Meteor Explosion