Hi all,
Im looking to make an areal strategy game and am stumped on how i can best going about producing some clouds that have a 3d effect for my little air planes to fly over/in. The only idea ive had is to use something like the smoke from the vent in the features video Unreal Engine 4 Features Walkthrough (HD 1080p) - YouTube
I was wondering how i can go about making this sort of effect into flat cloud-like ‘planes’ (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Clouds_from_aircraft.jpg) or smaller cloud ‘blobs’ and also how performance intensive would the demo method be? (incase there’s a lot of clouds).
Anyone got any ideas?
There’s a lot of ways you could go about making something like this.
A particle system like the one in the video you linked would definitely look best, something like the one used in this example: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/ContentExamples/EffectsGallery/1_H/index.html
But like you said it would be quite performance heavy.
You could make it so there’s just planes with normals that spawn at different altitudes and fly in a direction you want using particle systems, without translucency and other performance heavy stuff it shouldn’t be too heavy.
But might not look as good.
What platform are you developing for?
Hi sitrec thanks for the reply!
That’s the sort of look i’d ideally love to have, i’m looking to create this for android, and there arent many polys on the screen at once so i have some frames “to burn” i guess.
Given that its a strategy game with a 50 degreeish top down view i think if i lock the camera angle i might be able to fake that kind of look nicely with cloud planes as you mentioned.
Do you think its best to spawn these 2d clouds as particles and make them move, or use a few large, static ones and have the clouds pan across them(like the skydome on the template level) as these are in the backdrop beneath the level.
Beyond that i could spawn some particles in small clumps at ‘level-height’ for gameplay(so planes can hide in them) or use a translucent 3d mesh, though itd probably look horrible lol
I’m not very familiar with developing for mobile but I think that you should make something just like you said that works like a regular sky dome to use as the bottom/floor. It could have larger cloud sheets that moved across it’s surface and maybe even a layer at the bottom that shows the ground bellow (if you don’t want the clouds to always completely cover everything). And then add a few particle system emitters with separate clouds at different altitudes, top ones could be a bit transparent so you can see the silhouette of the planes through them.
Shouldn’t be too performance heavy.
Hi Futo333,
We have not heard back from you in a few days, so we are marking this post as Resolved for tracking purposes. If you are still experiencing the issue you reported, please respond to this message with additional information and we will offer further assistance.
Thanks, TJ