Particle Effects, How do they do that ?

cmtanko

firstly, I would like to share this video of diablo

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3qx4RcoyLA"]Diablo III - Monk Sweeping Wind HD Runestone Preview - YouTube[/ame]


My question now is, the PEs are 2D images, and we using Esenthel game engine's PE + timeline effect... But how do we achieve the effects as in that Video which looks totally 3D..... Maybe other good engines like UDK,Crytek have better features, but what I want to know is how can we do that manually,since our engine doesn't have much feature for PEs....

Any links, tuts, you can provide would be helpful..

Thank you,...

vreza

Use planes. Just like creating hair. Take care of the silhouette and it wont look like 2D (to most people, that is). Tends to be easier on isometric game.

Eric Chadwick

Some resources here
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategorySpecialEffects

Warhawk,

Such effects can be achieved by using cylindrical shapes. Make tilable effect texture and use additive shader, or alpha blend. It depends on what you want to do.

On the cylinder mesh use UV animation for the texture to move. To make things more interesting you can add more layers with mesh and assign different speeds for UV animation. Or simply scale UVs to your liking.

You can also make skeleton for each individal effect and do simple animation, to create more interesting effects.

Everything else depends on programmers implementation, how to show and hide this effects. You can also time them differently.

Will Faucher

Many of those are created using ribbons as well, it all depends on what particle editor you are using. Some are more robust than others.

Bruno Afonseca

I do most of mine using crossed ribbons and billboards. Perhaps you should download Unity and play with their editor, it's quite straightforward and should give you a good idea on how these things work!

cmtanko

thanks guys for the quick reply.. I had also been using custom mesh and animated in Maya, but the effect wasn't anything near to it.. LOL .. maybe because,its hard to do the texture for these kind of things...
Unity is not an option for me, as I am not using that...

@Fonfa: whats a crossed Ribbons ???

bugo

You won't be able to create such particles if you don't know how to script or create expressions in Maya. Unity will be way faster and easier for you to do such things, or UDK.

cmtanko

ahh okay thanks @Bugo, but after creating those in UDK or Unity can we export them, so that we would use that in our engine ???