Hey, I’m wondering if anyone could give some tips / advice on how to achieve the fake volcano / science experiment volcano effect in UE4.
If you’re unsure what I mean, here’s a video of the effect I’m trying to recreate : http://youtu.be/GZRpuyH7Nbk?t=3m45s (not my video)
I know I could use particle effects or a mesh with a panner texture, but I’d really love to get that “foamy” look to it. Any advice would be much appreciated.
Cheers.
Anyone able to offer some advice?
You can either try this: Metaballs Proof of Concept - Work in Progress - Unreal Engine Forums
Or do what Epic did with Elemental Demo and use a morphing mesh.
As to the material if you want foamy look, you need a foam texture of some sort and then use it for some parallax effect, also generate a normal map out of it if you want more detail. And SSS for material type would be good i think.
Thanks for the reply. I’ve been looking at Portal for inspiration but I had no idea what the technique was! Now I’ve learnt of metaballs! Though currently that’s too complex for me, it’s good to finally have found out.
Sadly I’ve been researching morph targets / blend shapes for static meshes but I’m unsure how they get to UE4 from Maya - I know there is a 3Ds Max plugin/node.
Thanks for the help. Given me some more ideas to think about and research.
It doesnt necessarily have to be a static mesh. You can create morph targets for the lava and then import it as a skeletal mesh and setup the morph targets. I dont use Maya though so i cant give you any more detail on the process.