Lighting Workshop Week 2

 

Lighting Workshop Week 1

I did a third one just for the fun of it, I was really enjoying this.

Progress on WoW Inspired VFX

 Over the winter break, I've been making progress on a World of Warcraft inspired VFX. I took inspiration from their priest class and have been making an AOE healing spell. 

pls ignore the low video quality :P

I'm gonna break down some chunks of the effect.

For the AOE fx, it's composed of a couple mesh renders, beams, and sprites. I created a disc mesh in Houdini and edited the vertex colors to create a gradient from 0 to 1 to 0 from the edge to the center. For the material, I essentially lerped two noise textures on top of each other for the Emissive color, and created an erosion mask using a Voronoi texture that's controlled using dynamic parameters.

On the edges, I used beams and got them in place using a shape location module with the ring as the shape primitive. They use a similar material to one I'll discuss in the next part of the effect. Lastly, I have two sprite emitters - one for a burst as the AOE spawns, and another of some random hanging particulates.

For the effect that occurs on a player within the AOE, I'm using three beam emitters and one sprite emitter. I made a material for the beams that has two different trails and gave them a bit of distortion and WPO. I made another version of that with a rainbow as a sort of light halo effect, WoW's priest class has very subtle rainbows in their VFX so I wanted to emulate that.

The sprites just briefly float up from where they spawn, but as of now they're not timed and I'll need to work on it further.

There's still two more parts to work on with this effect, both being tied to the player that casts the spell. Once I get a good grasp at all 4 parts, I'll begin fine tuning the effect's look and timing. Working on this was a bit frustrating but rewarding at the same time! It helped me understand UV's more and I have a better foundation for all of the nodes and modules I have available to me in both materials and niagara fx. I also got to work a bit with blueprints too, which was a huge help. Excited to continue working on this!