Darkness FX

anonymous_user_567416d21 · July 30, 2015, 7:35pm

Hello. Im trying to make a darkness FX and i need help.

The effect i want to achieve looks like black ink spreading in water. It would be also nice if it could distort and gray out/darken the surrounding.

What material should i use to darken everything around? Is it even possible to do with Cascade and particles?
I would be very thankful for any help/tips or useful links i could use.

#EDIT
Also, it would be cool if it had collisions to flow around meshes, since this FX will be used with characters. Is it even possible?

kennyrosenyc · August 1, 2015, 3:01pm

That’s a LOT of particles. You could try lighting them with a stupidly high intensity and using a dark color. Might work. But you’ll probably need a vector field from Maya to make it look like that.

anonymous_user_567416d21 · August 3, 2015, 3:11pm

I am already giving up on fighting with particles, i am trying to render the effect in Maya and just use a rendered animation as the effect.

Jak_Carver · August 3, 2015, 3:55pm

You may want to look into something like FumeFX; I use that and AfterEffects to do most of my VFX work for my job. I also use Maya for some VFX. That’s a very complicated effect you’re trying to make, especially since you want to have it interact with gameplay.

anonymous_user_567416d21 · August 5, 2015, 1:50pm

Im just looking at it, i thought it would come to this Thanks for help anyway.

haldolium · August 5, 2015, 5:16pm

Yeah volumetric particle effects like that are only achievable via offline rendering solutions for particle FX like Fume/ThinkingParticles. Another tool you may want to check out since it offers a comparable cheap “indie” version would be SideFX Houdini. I don’t know how strong Blender is in that regard by now, but maybe you want to check it out as well.

Also this beta plugin for UE4 might be interesting for you: PopcornFX Plugin BETA - Released Projects - Unreal Engine Forums