How could I create something like this?

Hey guys. I’ve seen few features in the new killing floor which really got me thinking of how would I re-create something like that. So here’s the first thing.

  1. You can heal someone with the syringe gun. It has vial of some fluid on it and when you heal anyone, it will remove some of the serum and over the time, serum goes back to the gun. Here’s the part of the video from youtube of how it looks like:
    GIF | Gfycat
    Can someone explain to me what would be the basic approach on how to remove part of the model from the weapon and then put it back on with some animation?
    I don’t need any scripts or something, I just want to know are there some functions or something that could make something like that.
  2. In the game, the fluid’s texture is moving on the syringe gun. How would I create something like moving texture on the part of a model?
  3. Are effects like lighting and other stuff made in modelling software or? And what about waterfalls where there are water drops and other things, is that also done in modelling software?

I’m really looking forward to your answers!

-Kindly regards,

Speaking to #1, if you were an artist, you could animate the fluid “plug” inside the transparent gun syringe as a smooth tween from “expended” to “full.” Then in UE4 you would tween under program control, slowly driving the animation along. As a programmer, I would probably scale the entire plug linearly along its length to make it appear smaller/larger.

Speaking to #2, the texture looks like just a simple swirling UV animation, but the video is a bit choppy; that can be done various ways but basically involves adjusting the texture base UV offset. You could also adjust the mesh UVs on the fly if you wanted a more complicated action.

Speaking to #3, my extremely limited UE4 experience would be that you would create chunks and parts of effects in modeling software, then put it together inside of UE4 and apply the necessary scripting and settings and lighting, etc., to get the effect you desire.

Hope that gives some insight.

Thank you so much for your answer Kurt!
So I could just then scale the object by lets say, y axis, so I can make the object longer/shorter in the vial. Awesome.
Could you maybe write down here some scripting functions which could be used to make that?

Well, I’m sad to say that I don’t know what UV is and how to animate it. I’ll hopefully learn that one day.