Thank you, Zezkaii and The_M0ss_Man! I appreciate your words.
Currently I’m working on a sci-fi crown that Hayley will put on the “main” character alien.
I’ll share views on the process of that later, but for now, as promised, starting in chronological order of development:
Project Begining
I started everything in UE4. In a game prototype that I was creating in my spare time. I had a top-down player camera and it was going to be a hack-and-slash with lots of movement and cool spells.
I did get to prototype some of the movement but never really got to making many spell abilities. Mainly because once I was trying out the first few - bunch of quicksilver-like, metal, projectiles - I dug deep into learning Houdini.
It was fun to try Houdini and some fluid-like anims in there. I also had came across the idea of VATs few years prior and always wanted to get an occasion to try the concept.
That’s how I made these above (well skipping most of the nitty-gritty detail, you can read that over at my blog).
Having made those orbs and given them some emission, of course… you can guess where I am going: I really wanted to try the emission in UE5.
Funny enough this was in such early version of UE5 when I started it that the emission was hard to pick up and I had to put an unrealistically high amount to get the visual above.
Something that was fixed with the Lumen improvements in UE5.1.
From there on, from that image you see above, you could probably guess what my next thinking was too.
I thought trying out a game prototype for fun in my spare time is all cool, but I really wanted to try and use the floating orb (and its animations and VATs I had made) into a scene.
That would be an environment where the orb would be the central piece and there would be a ritual happening around it.
Thats when I moved fully to a new project in UE5 and focused on creating the environment.
I kind of skimmed over the details of all of this process and thinking above. I wanted to keep this post short. But if you want to dig deeper into details about VAT and what my ideas were when I started the scene, you can read so over at the first blog in the series of this project:
Over there I’ve linked more resources about Houdini, VATs and initial ideas on how to generate orbs and floating stuff like this in Houdini (before getting into any animations to then turn into VATs).
I hope you enjoy seeing and reading about it!
Until the next post!
Cheers,
Pete.