Portalicious

So I'm finally finished with this project, having added in a quick animation that I did for the staff in 3ds max. It was actually really fun working on even such a simple animation, it's definitely something that I'm looking forward to getting more into. 

Now I'm looking forward to starting some new projects. Maybe work on improving the way I render out my projects.

Just a quick update with some slight changes I've made to the effect. All that I've got left to do is try and make an animation for the staff and set up a proper render.

Bringing it together

After being out of the country for a quick break, it's time to get back to it. I've got the majority of the work done for this project now. The only parts that are left are to do with the final render, like building a small environment and putting together an animation for the staff etc.

Having just put this together I've noticed that the core light of the energy build up fades out a little slowly so I'll just have to quickly tweak the timing, but that's only a small issue. However, I'm still not sold on my approach to the portal itself. I came across an interesting approach to this type of effect by Epic for the UDK itself, in which they use a mesh and bend the UV's to get a really nice tendril effect in the material. I'm thinking of exploring this option because I experimented with having the portal by itself, supporting effects both infront and behind it but nothing worked in my opinion so I feel I will need to revise it before finishing this off completely.

In other news, this is the last project that I had planned for my portfolio so now I can start to think about rendering out my other projects and putting them together in a show reel.

Portal Update

Just a quick update on my portal effect. This is just a simple emitter at the moment with it spawning the portal shader in cascade. 

It's set up so that I can control the growth, edge colour intensity and the distortion on the portal interior all on the fly in cascade with a dynamic parameter. The colour of the edge is controlled by a vector parameter through a material instance. 

This is only the portal right now but I'm going to give it a lot of supporting sprites to help sell the effect of it bursting into life and also some to give a bit of extra visual fidelity to the portal itself, as I feel it's a bit dull by itself. I also want to go back and add a bit more visual interest to the portal interior, like some nebula clouds to just make it look more interesting.

Magic and Portal

So it's been a while since I last updated my blog, but at the start of this month my laptop decided to break unexpectedly and I've only just gotten my new one through and set up. It's nice to get back into work again and I thought I'd do a quick update on my current project.

This is the progression of my idea from the previous post. The idea is that this part below would be attached to the top of a staff, through a bone and socket.  

The staff would then cast the element below. The intention is that this will be a build up of energy that will then explode outwards leaving behind it a portal type of effect.

I'm thinking of doing the majority of the portal effect through a shader, like using techniques for material transitions to adjust the growth and expansion of the portal. I'll then support the portal with a particle system to tie the whole effect together.

Fire and Ribbons, what could go wrong

I've been trying to hone the basics recently, more particularly working on improving my fire effects. These are just some tests focusing on using different textures to obtain a different look and scale of fire.  

I feel like, even though there's still a lot of work to do and progress to be made, that it's definitely coming along. And I've also made some progress on the gas station scene. I think it's getting very close to being finished.

In other news, I decided to knuckle down and properly learn how to use ribbons. I thought that doing some bullet trails would be a good way to practice using ribbons. So here are some concepts I came up with so that I could do some more exciting ribbons than bullet tracers.

And here are the renders for the outcomes. I like the overall outcome, in that I think they have an alright aesthetic and that I learnt a lot about how to use ribbons. But I do think that perhaps the impact effects of the electric and energy shots are a little too visually noisy and complicated. I think that they could probably do with being simplified.

This is something that I worked up for my next project. I want to work on something that has various stages to it and also something that forces me to use different skills. Plus, it'll be nice to work on something not based in reality.

Before and After

Been working some more on the gas station scene now that I've got the majority of the trial and error out of the way. Below is how it was looking before.

And now for how it's looking at the moment. It's still very much WIP but at least it's an improvement.

As I said, it's still a WIP but it's a vast improvement from my previous attempt. First of all, not sure why the initial explosion is rendering so poorly. But other than that, I still need to rework the RPG as I'm not very practised with using ribbons but I was planning on doing some work with ribbons after this project to get a better sense of them.

The fire needs some major work I feel. I think that the material and the particle system is good, but I think that the scale of the texture is wrong. Whilst this would be idea for a torch or a camp fire, it doesn't have enough textural detail to suggest that it's a large roaring fire. I need some more practice creating high detail fire sims anyway so I might do some more to generate the textures I need.

I also need to make the particle system for the fire on the pillar and once I've done that it'll tie in the fire licks that come up over the top, so that they look less out of place and actually have a cause to start. And I also think that I need to give the larger explosion a bit more punch. Though once I've got the ribbon done for the RPG I can reuse it for some debris trails.