Sprint #3 Delivery

For this sprint I worked on polishing the tornado effect and also starting with the look of her magic. This was set up in blueprint using a timeline and aligning the sword to the time of the magic effect.

A new addition to the sword effect was adding a vertex color in Houdini to add and emissive color to the inside part of the sword to highlight it more before its materialized. 

UE 5.1 using Niagara effect

My new reference for her sword is Sub Zero's ice weapons an so will give a more bright color before it fully materialize.

Working with the new brush texture map provide by my teammate, I panned it in a spline mesh with the use of dynamic parameters.

Add a random color to the magic lines

Using an dynamic parameter to control the panning of the texture inside Niagara

Polish the look of the tornado effect using the same brush texture of the magic hand. Added a curve scale in the Z axis so the tornado grows to it's final size and using the particle position of make the rotation faster or slower depending of it.

Sprint #2 Delivery

First pass of the tornado VFX. I started with using particles in Houdini as my base but after finding it so tedious, Niagara gave me better and faster results.

Tornado using Niagara

Using the mesh position to control the twirl of the tornado with curves

Sword VFX implementation inside the engine had some issues since exporting the VAT texture in Houdini needed the parameters of w, orient and pivot, which my animation did not had because it works with using the voronoi fracture point positions and normal and so in no moment did I converted it into a rigid body. My solution was to first to convert it into a rigid body dynamic and simulated the pieces falling. This generated the attributes that I needed and then I just imported the output of this as my geometry input that assembles the pieces together.

Sword in Engine with textures

Also translated the points to be to the back of the camera before they materialize together so they are hidden to what is seen in the camera.

Convert voronoi sword into RBD packed object

RBD output as geometry input for the transform pieces

Merged object of the sword mesh with the pivot, orient and w attributes needed for exporting RBD VAT