Friday 15 November 2013

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.

Saturday 9 November 2013

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.