Dragon Ball Fighters Z - effects, sw00shes and visual fx
polycounter lvl 5
Hi, I was watching this: 
https://youtu.be/hdnq53SdXZE?t=11m35s
And I was wondering how do they use the "swoosh" effects on punches? It clearly looks like a sprite who´s parented to the position
of the punch in a higher layer than the characters, this would be something similar:
page
So it can be used like this:
page
And when animated on the game engine shows:
Some effects are nested and later scaled from 0 to 100 scale for the character so it will be a constant and easy call from code to reproduce the effect. Some of these files show that kind of "trick" to be used at runtime:
page
page
Question:
How good / bad is to nest effects on the root of the model?
Is it best practice to call out all effects at runtime? If so, where do you nest them to follow the movement of the player?
Thanks.
https://youtu.be/hdnq53SdXZE?t=11m35sAnd I was wondering how do they use the "swoosh" effects on punches? It clearly looks like a sprite who´s parented to the position
of the punch in a higher layer than the characters, this would be something similar:
page
So it can be used like this:
page
And when animated on the game engine shows:
Some effects are nested and later scaled from 0 to 100 scale for the character so it will be a constant and easy call from code to reproduce the effect. Some of these files show that kind of "trick" to be used at runtime:
page
page
Question:
How good / bad is to nest effects on the root of the model?
Is it best practice to call out all effects at runtime? If so, where do you nest them to follow the movement of the player?
Thanks.
Replies
I watched that video a while ago and the main thing i remember was that his analysis didnt seem 100% correct. I cant remember what makes recall it like that, something about the smears I think.
Basically They used 3d flipbooks in GGXrd for special effects.
There was a thread here on polycount with some good info and discussion.
However most of the links seem to be broken.
http://polycount.com/discussion/121144/convincing-3d-that-looks-like-2d-wow/p1
PC thread
http://i.imgur.com/1ZX21zZ.png
3d flipbook.
GDC talk about NPR in GGXrd
http://www.4gamer.net/games/216/G021678/20140714079/
Some good example of how they did their effects. Its basically swapping actual 3dmeshes per frame. like a 3d flipbook.
Its in japanese, but has a bunch of example images on deformations and what not. You can use google translate to make more sense of it.
So my questions continues to be: HOW do they invoke those effects? By scaling them from a root node from 0 to 100? or opacity? or they are scripted, how?
So my guess is that they are just playing a particle system on an animation event.
In UE4 you create a socket on a bone.
In whatever animation, you can either set the particle effect to play in the animation itself using an anim notify event.
Or use bleuprints to play the particle effect when the notify triggers.
My guess is that it does not make sense to store the particle effects at scale 0 and just upscale them when needed.
He also mentioned that they are using regular 2d effects for most of the hitspark effects, so they use a mix of both.
But to go more into the technical aspect, yes, they are scripted, using the same script language they used in their sprite-based games like Blazblue, so among gameplay instructions there's one that is essentially "change to sprite X of animation Y", wired into the equivalent UE mesh swap action.
I even created a quick short video to reference the sprite and smears techniques here: