Simple Particles Special Effect

I am starting with simple special effects of hero skills, to show hit direction, similar to:

But my approach only works from top down camera view.

This is my current progress (PG):

Also I wonder if these could be done with babylon particle system, but I guess those would be quite advanced only for experts?

Let me add @PatrickRyan as he is a VFX wizard

@Takemura, if I am understanding the effects in the samples you posted, you are looking for a swipe trail effect or some sort of spin attack trail effect in the first image. In the second image it looks like some sort of cloud effect that is distorting the background in some sort of heat distortion effect. Iā€™m not too familiar with Black Desert and so I have not seen their attack FX.

You are correct in that these are more complex FX, as they will need several techniques blended together to look correct. There will also be some custom shaders and/or post process techniques to complete the looks.

The only example I have of particle effects in combination with shader effects like this is this demo showing some animated shader effects in combination with some particle systems. I donā€™t have anything to show weapon trails like these. However, it has been on my list for a while to work up examples of this type of effect. I will build an example of a couple simple techniques for this type of system. Give me a little time to work something up.

5 Likes

@Takemura, in looking at the best ways to create complex particle systems for Babylon.js, I found myself going down the path of asking if there is an easier way to do some of these tasks. I also found that there are several areas of our docs that needed shoring up. I tackled a bunch of the documentation gaps for particle systems, but I have also identified several areas where we may want to improve our features. I will be talking with the team in the near future (we have a lot of vacation time overlapping right now between team members) to see what we may want to pick up as improvements.

For now, I will leave you with the PG example I have been using to test with. There are some things in the PG that arenā€™t where we want them to be - such as the rotation of particles in a local system emitting from an animated mesh emitter. But you can use the PG as an example of how to create a more complex effect for a character.

Once we identify what we may want to improve in the workflow and plug any gaps, I will start creating some tutorials about the techniques. But in the meantime, feel free to pull this example apart and see how I got these effects while we work on more complete tutorials.

14 Likes

This is definitely magic! Looking forward to the Great wizardā€™s magic tutorial. :heart_eyes:

4 Likes

Looks like you had some fun there :smile: Iā€™m sure the tutorial will become just another ā€˜must haveā€™ from your serie of tutos. Looking forward to it :child:.

1 Like

It looks amazing! In Slash 1 and 2, I couldnā€™t see the trail effect. Is it just me, or did the new engine version cause some issues?

@Evgeni_Popov can you have a look ?

1 Like

@ertugrulcetin, The trail effect is still there, itā€™s just very subtle and is best viewed from overhead.

This one is just a shader on a flag in the asset and we are animating the shader values to ā€œgrowā€ the length of the trail. The texture used has a gradient we are using to make the trail appear longer or shorter based on the values passed to the shader.

2 Likes

Thanks for the info!

1 Like

@PatrickRyan, you mentioned considering creating tutorials on these topics. Are you planning to release tutorials on VFX? It would be a great addition.

@ertugrulcetin, the topic of FX in general is on the list for tutorials and documentation. Unfortunately, there are a lot of topics on the list and some are above that one. I would like to get it to the top of the list as soon as I can.

2 Likes