UDK Metaballs

JamesWild

A quick, rough implementation of an idea I had for implementing GPU accelerated metaballs.

At the bottom are planes with a white blob on them, additive blended. These are the points.

Then there's a plane over them with a material that takes the destcolour and uses it to scroll a texture with the colour gradient on it.

Simple!

Anyone got other ideas?

JamesWild

Now in 3D using particle emitters, billboards and a postprocess.

ambershee

Hmm, that's just mad enough to work. Can you go into a bit more detail? I'd love to try this out for myself - I think it has a shedload of potential (and not just for metaball style effects).

JamesWild

Basic working is:

Additive blended blobs stack up.
A post process then goes over the resulting image and uses the luminance to scroll through a texture which defines the bands.

That's it!

ambershee

JamesWild wrote: »

Basic working is:

Additive blended blobs stack up.
A post process then goes over the resulting image and uses the luminance to scroll through a texture which defines the bands.

That's it!

Now I'm following. It's pretty neat, but unfortunately UDK doesn't give you access to something like a discreet screen buffer, so you can't realistically draw this on top of the existing game world