Anyone would agree to say that this explosion looks way better than anything that could be done with sprites, but could this really be used ingame? The explosion in the video used 10 picture of 40964096 striped down to 20482048 and only looks good from a top view. Antoine say that to be able to get good result from any angle you would have to increase the number of slice so the number of texture as well or use a different technic all together. Im wondering what the different technic would be and if it’s would be more practical in term of ingame requirement cause seriously having explosions like that in game would be really great
So if anyone have more information or idea on this please share it
There would be a limited number of situations where something like that would work, not just because of the angle but with whatever’s happening in the game.
I use a different method to achieve a similar effect, I bake out a fluid simulation from maya into a huge (4096*2048 right now) sub-uv texture, but with different layers so it doesn’t just look like an overly detailed texture.
I’m sure eventually we’ll get infiltrator demo as a marketplace resource to look at
Why not use circle gradient particles that take the average color of the layer they are closer to, rather than using square billboards ? It might be more blurry and smoother but it would work from all angles and maintain the fully 3D volume.
By the way here’s another method for volumetric explosions that I used in Unity. It’s not the same with this technique and doesn’t have the level of detail of a pre-baked FumeFX explosion but it’s another way to do it.
It’s basically panning parallax textures on mushroomhead-like meshes with animation. It uses fresnel alpha to smooth the edges to give it a smokey look. Although it has issues with drawing order jumps since they are all translucent materials.
I am trying to understand the process described in the “Inside Unreal - Visual Effects - Part 3” video. For the most part I understand. However, I am struggling to understand a couple of things:
How do I create the 3D animated volume texture material?
How do I create the point cloud? (Is it just a standard GPU particle emitter with the 3D animated volume texture applied?
Any information or feedback on this would be much appreciated!
Now that the infiltrator demo is downloadable, the explosion volume PS system is indeed in the project, but I don’t quite know how to activate it. Does anyone know? Placing the PS system in a level doesn’t do it, it doesn’t have any event modules and it just loops an empty or invisible effect.
The material instance’s preview is gray and so is the master material, so it is difficult to say what is not working properly. I’ll have to look at it some more tomorrow when i’m not dead tired.
Other ways of building nice, swirly effects is to use real volume textures (vector fields for particles) or running an actual fluid simulation on the GPU, and turning that into your texture function, or using a sliding gradient plus a volumetric noise (like Perlin) plus a color look-up table.
Many ways to skin that cat, depending on what your particular needs are!
