How to use Refraction to get a distortion effect

Hi guys! I wanted to make a circular shockwave distortion effect (something like what can be seen in this video when sam parries: Another Jetstream Sam fight - YouTube).

In UDK there was the distortion effect, which has now been replaced by the refraction material property. However, I can’t seem to get very good effects from it at the moment - making a basic material, setting the refractive index to 1.5 (which should produce a distorting effect) and sticking it on a mesh doesn’t seem to do much, even allowing the shader to be compiled for that purpose.

Does anybody have any pointers here, both for how I could set up a particle system to produce the animated shockwave and how I should paramterise the material?

Hey TinyAngryCrab -

You will want to have a sphere mesh with its pivot point on the central origin of the sphere to begin with. Then make a Mesh Emitter in which the Sphere Scales Size / Life from 0,0,0 to N,N,N (N = total amount of expansion you would like to see from the effect.) Apply a Material like the one below and adjust the Dynamic Parameter in Cascade as desired.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

Thank you very much for taking the time out to do this Eric!

Hi, I’m trying to do something similar to this, but when I put a mesh type data on cascade with the Dynamic parameter, when I press Refresh, the dynamic data aren’t being refreshed, but when I do the same thing with a normal emitter, the dynamic refresh works prefectly :confused:

Hi Davixe -

There is a known issue with using Dynamic Parameters with Mesh Emitters. The Parameters will still work, but you will not get the named variables to show up in Cascade.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

Hey Eric,

I’m trying to recreate the material you posted above and I was wondering what the texture sample was as well as the settings of the material itself. I can’t seem to properly recreate it without errors.

Hi liondog -

The Material is a Translucent Unlit Material when you plug in the information into Refraction the Normal input becomes exposed. As far as the Normal Map I am using I believe it is T_Base_Tile_DetailNormal in Engine Content and it is a Normal Map but I am only using one light direction channel in the case above red.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

Hi Eric,

Could you provide a brief guide on how to set up the cascade side of this? I am still very new to cascade…